This summer, for the French moviegoer in search of a little heat, Delirious was a possible destination. The diehard independent filmmaker Tom DiCillo recounts the meeting between a small-time paparazzi (Steve Buscemi) and a homeless youth who becomes his assistant (Michael Pitt). To teach him the trade, he simply opens the trunk of his car with pride and shows him where he stores all the equipment and accessories necessary for his next scoop.
The Photomobile
Has this existed since the dawn of time? No, only since the time of Weegee, an American photographer who was born in Eastern Europe in 1899 and died in Manhattan in 1968, and to whom the Musée Maillol has dedicated a retrospective from June 20 to October 15 of vintage prints gathered with passion and patience by the collector Hendrik Berinson. Weegee made two self-portraits: one in 1941 in a grungy darkroom that he renamed “my headquarters”, and the other the following year, sitting on a stool in front of the open trunk of a Chevy Coupe fitted out as a photomobile. “My car became my home. (…) I kept everything in there, an extra camera, cases of flash bulbs, extra-loaded holders, a typewriter, firemen’s boots, boxes of cigars, salami, infra-red films for shooting in the dark, uniforms, disguises, a change of underwear, and extra shoes and socks. I was no longer tied to the teletype machine at police headquarters. I had my wings. I no longer had to wait for crime to come to me; I could go after it. The police radio was my life line. My camera… my life and my love… was my Aladdin’s lamp.”
Usher Fellig got his nickname from his colleagues at the Acme Newspictures photo agency, in reference to the Ouija boards used by mediums to communicate with the dead. He started out during the Prohibition era, on night assignments covering gang wars, heinous murders, arson and suicides – any sordid news item that disrupted New York at night and dressed up the front page at dawn. There he acquired technique and a sharp eye, earning him the reputation as a soothsayer, as when he photographed a hobo who was hit by a car and died only seconds later. This random event became a habit: Weegee knew gangsters and the homeless so well that he would eventually be taking their picture at their time of death.
Real Works of Art
Weegee wrote that his camera could be lethal for gangsters. Once he had taken a picture of them alive, he was guaranteed a trip back to photograph them once they were slain. “No bumping off was official until I arrived to take the last photo, and I tried to make their last photo a real work of art.” Weegee thus created a constant mix of photo journalism and art: either by swaying from one to the other – like, for one picture, the time he cruelly took composing the photo of a corpse – or by placing the news item in the context of the city, linking up the event with a nearby sign, or creating comical mountains. Hence, we read, “Simply add boiling water” 
on a burning building being hosed down by firefighters, or “Joy of Living” on a movie theater marquee in which the police have come to collect a corpse. Rather than remaining separate from the image, as with a caption, language enters the image itself.
Weegee’s importance was not so much in whether he wanted to transform photography into an art form, even though the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York consecrated an exhibit to him early on. The main point is rather that Weegee knew how to combine associate photography and other art forms. Inherited from cubism, which incorporated newspaper headlines into paintings, his wordplay also opened the path for Pop Artists, who similarly combined shop signs and slogans to create an ironic link. Andy Warhol would even use a “Car Accident” from the 1940s for his famous silkscreens, just as Francis Ford Coppola took inspiration from his picture of a man with a disfigured face for the death of Sonny at the end of Godfather I. His work has interacted innumerable times with cinema.
One must recognize Weegee’s paramount role in the esthetic contrast found in the film noir genre. His book, Naked City, published in 1947, inspired Hollywood so much that Jules Dassin made a film with the same name. Stanley Kubrick, a photographer at the time, covered the filming for a magazine and later invited Weegee as a consultant for Dr. Strangelove : he was even the basis for Peter Sellers’ accent. When he went back to California, Weegee started experimenting anew, but those who have followed can relate best to his motto Murder Is My Business.
The quotations are taken from the catalogue for the Weegee exhibition in Paris’s Musée Maillol, published in French by Gallimard. Similarly, the label Naïve Vision has released a DVD modeled after the catalog, “Mon Etrange Mission” (My Strange Mission). It includes a jazzy documentary by Olivier Kowalski featuring Bertrand and Olivier Lorquin, Curator and Director respectively of the Musée Maillol, one of whom is seated as he comments on the broad themes and main concerns of the photograph, while the other walks along recounting stories for each photo. It also includes a “Photo Gallery”, and as a bonus, a presentation of the Speed Graphic: a legendary camera that, according to Weegee, opens the doors onto crime scenes.
Related DVDs :
- Weegee, « mon étrange mission » (Naïve Visions)
- Naked City, by Jules Dassin (Wild Side)
- Dr Folamour, by Stanley Kubrick (Columbia)
- The Godfather, by Francis Ford Coppola (Paramount)
Antoine Thirion.