Ascher Fellig, an immigrant from Lemberg, Galicia who gained fame as Weegee, the photojournalist, was born on this date in 1899.
Weegee worked mostly at night and built a network of social contacts and short-wave radio techniques that allowed him often to beat the police to the scene of a crime — a feat that earned him the name Weegee, a variant of “Ouija,” the mind-reading board game. He maintained a darkroom in the trunk of his car and produced pictures that were filled with drama, emotion, and the tawdry aspects of life.
Weegee’s photos were published in nearly all of the major New York newspapers and were collected into Naked City (1945), a book that gave rise to a film and television series. He also worked in Hollywood from 1946 until the early 1960s, as an actor and special-effects consultant. Weegee was the photographer on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), and it was his accent that was adopted by Peter Sellers for the title character.
The entire Weegee catalogue of 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives is stored at the International Center for Photography in New York, which has published several books of his work.
“To me, pictures are like blintzes – ya gotta get ‘em while they’re hot.” —Weegee