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Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous Kindle Edition
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
The first comprehensive biography of Weegee—photographer, “psychic,” ultimate New Yorker—from Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid.
Arthur Fellig’s ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he renamed himself “Weegee,” claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. In Flash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied.
From self-taught immigrant kid to newshound to art-world darling to latter-day caricature—moving from the dangerous streets of New York City to the celebrity culture of Los Angeles and then to Europe for a quixotic late phase of experimental photography and filmmaking—Weegee lived a life just as worthy of documentation as the scenes he captured. With Flash, we have an unprecedented and ultimately moving view of the man now regarded as an innovator and a pioneer, an artist as well as a newsman, whose photographs are among most powerful images of urban existence ever made.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
- Publication dateJune 5, 2018
- File size116512 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BEST BIOGRAPHY OF 2018
*A New York Times and Library Journal Best Art Book of 2018, a Newsday and Town & Country Best Book of 2018, and a Star Tribune and Globe and Mail Best Holiday Gift Book*
“Christopher Bonanos has finally supplied us with the biography Weegee deserves: sympathetic and comprehensive, a scrupulous account with just the right touch of irreverence. Bonanos…takes the photographer seriously without letting him and his self-mythologizing off the hook.” ―The New York Times
"[A]n outstanding biography...Bonanos is a peerless guide to Weegee’s career, writing with obvious relish and great insight." ―Newsday
“A snappily written life of Weegee the Famous…[a] fine biography”―The Wall Street Journal
"Weegee and his world don’t encourage minimalism, and, fifty years after his death, he has at last acquired a biographer who can keep up with him." ―Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker
"Continually fascinating…deeply researched…compelling."―Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review*
“An analysis of the news photographer’s times, photos, and techniques as well as of his publicity-hungry persona, this it the biography the pseudonymous Arthur Fellig – self-anointed ‘official photographer for Murder Inc.’ – deserves.” ―The Globe and Mail
"The cut and strut of Bonanos’ vivid prose captures the rough-and-tumble of mid-twentieth-century New York, while vital details gleaned from his extensive research enliven the portrait...he makes the man behind the camera fully human." ―Booklist, *Starred Review*
“[A] superb biography…Bonanos has meticulously researched every aspect of Weegee’s life, filling this fascinating and lively account with amusing and touching anecdotes.” ―Library Journal, *Starred Review*
“[An] impeccably researched biography…Bonanos offers a lively history of the early years of news photography, rich with anecdotes that create Weegee's persona." ―PopMatters.com
“Christopher Bonanos’ superb biography reveals how the man born as Usher Fellig in 1899 reinvented himself as a chronicler of the seedier sides of nocturnal Manhattan in the 1930s." ―The Seattle Times
“[A] gritty, exhilarating portrait” ―BoweryBoysHistory.com
"Vivacious … long-overdue and endlessly entertaining." ―The Santa Fe New Mexican
“[A]n energetic and informative biography…Bonanos’s revelatory portrait of 'Weegee the Famous' will interest general readers, as well as those with a special interest in photojournalism.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig was perhaps the perfect vehicle for defining and delivering the fear and wonder of the modern city to our American spirit. Journalist, artist, and huckster, Weegee stole shards of a New York through a camera lens, then reassembled the great city in a mosaic that somehow―despite a fair degree of fraud―still defines urbanity itself for us. We know the photographs, and now, with this biography from Christopher Bonanos, we can finally know something of the legendary, improbable, and much-caricatured man."―David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire and The Deuce
"Flash is a crackling portrait of a man and his era―as immediate and as alive as Weegee's pictures themselves. Chris Bonanos vivifies not only his subject, but the long lost New York that he lived in, and that made him."―Daniel Okrent, New York Times bestselling author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
“Weegee, in addition to being one of the greatest photographers ever, was a cartoon character and something of a living myth. This has confused perception for the better part of eighty years. Christopher Bonanos's nuanced and sympathetic account succeeds in merging those three aspects―not only was a lot of the bluster for real, but even the pure baloney was hard-won and contextually grounded. His is a sweet and melancholy book and a doorway into a mostly misremembered past.”
―Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
“There’s something about a car crash that makes people slow down as they pass by. The same is true of Weegee’s photos. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked to have known him, but it would’ve been interesting to have met him. And this fascinating biography by Christopher Bonanos brings to life the gritty old New York City where he lived and worked. He was a legendary character whose work inspired young hopefuls like myself."―Cindy Sherman, artist
From the Back Cover
"Flash is a crackling portrait of a man and his era--as immediate and as alive as Weegee's pictures themselves. Chris Bonanos vivifies not only his subject, but the long lost New York that he lived in, and that made him." ―Daniel Okrent, New York Times bestselling author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
"Weegee, in addition to being one of the greatest photographers ever, was a cartoon character and something of a living myth. This has confused perception for the better part of eighty years. Christopher Bonanos's nuanced and sympathetic account succeeds in merging those three aspects--not only was a lot of the bluster for real, but even the pure baloney was hard-won and contextually grounded. His is a sweet and melancholy book and a doorway into a mostly misremembered past."
―Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
"There's something about a car crash that makes people slow down as they pass by. The same is true of Weegee's photos. Maybe I wouldn't have liked to have known him, but it would've been interesting to have met him. And this fascinating biography by Christopher Bonanos brings to life the gritty old New York City where he lived and worked. He was a legendary character whose work inspired young hopefuls like myself." ―Cindy Sherman, artist
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Flash
The Making of Weegee the Famous
By Christopher BonanosHenry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2018 Christopher BonanosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-306-3
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Epigraph,
Introduction,
PART I OUT OF THE DARK,
PART II THE FAMOUS,
Notes,
Index,
Also by Christopher Bonanos,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
In 1899, the town of Zolochev was not the worst place in the world in which to be a Jew. Today, it is a good-sized suburb about an hour's drive from the city of Lviv, in the western part of Ukraine. At the close of the nineteenth century, it was out on the unfashionable eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Lviv was called Lemberg. Galicia was the name of the province in which it lay, under the awkward dual control of Vienna and Budapest. It was a crossroads of cultures, and thus of languages. Most residents spoke Polish because much of Galicia had once been part of Poland, but there was German in the streets as well, and a little Ukrainian, and lots of Yiddish.
Whether for Jews or Gentiles, though, it was not a comfortable or easy place to live. Galicia was the poorest part of the empire, with frequent famines and epidemics. The industrialization that was improving life in much of the rest of Europe was not really being pursued here; that kind of investment was being made, and its profits spent, way to the west. (Although, within a few years, even Zolochev would have telephone and telegraph service.) From these eastern territories, most of what the government wanted was a steady flow of wheat and potatoes. Viennese pastry depended upon Galician flour.
The town had roughly ten thousand residents then, about half of them Jews. If this had been a Russian village, its Jewish residents would havebeen facing systematic disenfranchisement, attacks, and horrific deaths in the pogroms. In Galicia, by contrast, there was, if not exactly harmony, at least a manageable equilibrium. Quite a few Jews in Zolochev had reached the merchant class, and you could almost tell how successful they were by their language of choice: the more they'd established themselves, the likelier they were to have shed Yiddish for Polish, as they integrated themselves into the local power structure. The town had a Jewish mayor, and it was represented by Jews in the parliament in Vienna. The emperor, Franz Joseph I, had bestowed equal citizenship upon his Jewish subjects, declaring their civil rights "not contingent in the people's religion." In return, the emperor was well liked by the Galician Jewish population, members of which wrote appreciative prayers and songs about him that were printed in their prayer books. There were, roughly speaking, three classes of Jews in town: successful bourgeois business folk, who dressed like city people; the poor but observant, whose dress and religious observance were, in the words of one contemporary, "half-civilized"; and the Hasidim, in their black fur hats.
Berisch and Rivka Felig were somewhere on the lower rungs of the middle group. They lived in House 226, according to public records. By June 1899, they had been married for not quite three years, with a son named Elias, and their second child was on the way. Berisch was literate and had learned Hebrew. He yearned to become a rabbi, although he didn't or couldn't do what it took to become ordained. In his son's memoir, we are told that the family spoke German and Polish, but it is overwhelmingly likely (and records suggest, and the rest of the family agrees) that the household language was Yiddish.
Rivka was also educated, and was a little bit further up the social ladder than her husband because her father owned some property and had his own business, supplying food under contract to the Austrian army. (Berisch worked for his in-laws, in fact.) She came from the large and widespread Imber family. An older relative from Zolochev named Naftali Herz Imber was in the midst of becoming a prominent poet, which suggests that he was well-off enough to do more than grub out a living. One of his poems, half a century later, was set to music and became "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem.
Berisch and Rivka's second son was born on June 12, 1899. They named him Usher. That he would, on another continent, become more famous than his cousin (for making art with a camera, a field that barely existed in 1899 and absolutely did not exist in the worldview of a hungry family in Zolochev) was not foremost in his parents' minds.
When a third son, Feibish, arrived two years later, the pressure to keep the children fed became more intense, and a political shift that took lucrative contracts away from Jews undercut the family business. The local détente was beginning to break down, too: less than a generation later, in 1918, Lviv would be the site of a vicious three-day pogrom. Great numbers of Galicia's citizens were leaving, and even a not-very-ambitious father could see that a better future lay elsewhere. In the twenty years preceding the First World War, three million people emigrated. About a quarter of those went to America.
Berisch went first, alone, in August 1903. That arrangement was not uncommon. The idea was to get a job on the reputedly gold-paved streets of an American city and eventually send some of that treasure home so the family could reunite. Maybe Berisch was just ready to try his luck in a new place; maybe it was because Rivka had found out she was expecting a fourth child, and he simply couldn't support six people on the work he could get. He left on the Hamburg-America Line's steamship Pretoria, packed into steerage with twenty-two hundred other people (plus a couple of hundred up above, in first and second class). It was one of the company's newer, faster ships, and the crossing took the typical seven days.
At Ellis Island, he named a cousin, Abraham Zwerling (who listed his address in a tenement at 201 East Seventh Street), as his contact in the New World. (At least, Berisch claimed they were cousins; it was not uncommon for immigrants to concoct a kinship with someone already in America, in the belief that it would ease their admission. There were indeed Zwerlings among the Jews of Zolochev, so Berisch and Abraham were probably related somehow.) Berisch — he quickly became "Bernard," although one document says that he briefly tried on "Barnet" for size — listed his occupation as "laborer," which is telling; he may have been a learned man, but now he would do whatever it took to get by. When he disembarked, he pledged, in accordance with the law, that he had no criminal record, was not a polygamist, was not an anarchist. He had four dollars in his pocket.
Even the poorest American city dwellers today would find it almost impossible to imagine the density and intensity of the Lower East Side into which he arrived. In the preceding fifty years, the five boroughs constituting New York City (only recently consolidated into one entity, in 1898) had quintupled their population, to 3.5 million. Most of those new people were not American babies but immigrants flooding in from the Old World. First from Ireland and England, then from northern Europe, and subsequently from Italy and Greece and Russia and Austria-Hungary, came ships packed full of people like Berisch turned Bernard, sometimes a thousand per day. Industrial America absorbed them, to fill factory jobs and build skyscrapers and dig subway tunnels. Because New York was the country's biggest manufacturing center, a lot of these new Americans went no farther than the port city where they'd disembarked.
In 1900, the district known as the Seventeenth Ward, which included that tenement where Abraham Zwerling lived on East Seventh Street, had a population of 130,796, packed into less than half a square mile. The only denser areas were immediately to the south, deeper into the Lower East Side. (Those areas, still pretty crowded, house about a quarter as many residents now as they did then.) A tenement building that today is home to perhaps a dozen people typically held about seventy. Kids slept three and four to a mattress. Some single men did not rent or even share a room; instead, they rented eight hours' worth of a single grimy bed, and two other "tenants," if you can call them that, slept there during the other two shifts. If Berisch had a dime to spare, it was most likely sent home to Zolochev, where Rivka was getting help (probably financial, certainly personal, and absolutely necessary in either case) from her extended family.
Usher knew little of the city where his father was living. When the family was in Europe, he said later, "there was one [American] building that was outstanding. They had pictures of it. That was the Singer Building," at forty-seven stories the tallest skyscraper downtown, brand new in 1908. "That was the only building we knew, and as a matter of fact, nobody believed they really had a building that high."
As a grown man, Arthur Fellig said almost nothing else about this period of his life. He and his siblings always described their origins as "Austria," which sounded genteel to many Americans, implying schlag and Sacher torte. It also conveyed the lingering national pride that Emperor Franz Joseph's benevolence had instilled. Mostly, though, Galicia amounted to a life and a place that Arthur and his brothers and sisters explicitly chose to leave behind.
In adulthood, Weegee told only one extended story about the old country, and he played it for slapstick and pathos. His father, he said, at one point sent home a packet of a dozen "throwaways," flyers that looked like twenty-dollar bills on one side and carried an ad for a local business on the other. Berisch was probably goofing around (which is what Arthur later suggested), joking as if the throwaways were real cash; he may have been making an honest mistake; he may himself have been conned. In any case, Rivka and her family didn't know what American currency was supposed to look like, and neither did the local bank. She thought that her ship had literally come in, and she booked passage as soon as the counterfeit $240 had been deposited. The family's bags were packed when the bankers came after them and canceled everything. It was a disappointing and embarrassing moment, one that left a mark on Usher Fellig.
In New York, Berisch kept working, eventually with a pushcart, and managed to send actual money sometime later. Rivka and the children were headed to America. It was the summer of 1909. They made their way to Hamburg, where they boarded the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, a slightly nicer vessel than the Pretoria. It had, at its launch a few years earlier, briefly been the largest liner in the world, and the well-off passengers in first class experienced luxurious travel. Which is not to say it was especially nice down in fourth class, where the Felligs were: they had paid roughly thirty-five dollars per passenger, which entitled nobody to a cabin. Although conditions in the belly of a steamship had sharply improved in new vessels such as the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria — just a few years earlier, many had not provided separate bathing areas for women and men, and the washrooms had had only cold-seawater spigots — this was no vacation cruise. Bunks were lined up barracks style. If you were seasick (and on the Felligs' trip, rough weather made a lot of people seasick), being down there amid the cabbagey kitchen stink and the shared bathrooms only made things worse.
The family was reunited on September 4, when Berisch met them at the port. Usher Fellig later recalled having his eyes checked at Ellis Island for trachoma, the contagious form of conjunctivitis that was the terror of immigrants not only because it could blind them but also because it could get them sent back to Europe. Everyone in the family passed, and off they went to their new home. That day, spiritually if not officially, Usher Felig became Arthur Fellig.
The passenger manifest says that he couldn't read or write. When he was presented with a banana at Ellis Island, it was "the most amazing thing," he later recalled. "I'm glad one thing — someone told me to take the skin off." But, he added, "we didn't know any difference. I'd never seen anything like that before." He got an orange, too, and figured out how to peel it on his own.
Berisch had been living in Brooklyn, in a building at 292 Watkins Street. That was smack in the middle of Brownsville, a relatively new tenement neighborhood that had been built up as an alternative to the packed Lower East Side. (Predominantly populated by the poorest of immigrant Jews, it had quickly become a slum of its own. By 1909, it was notorious for street crime, a reputation it still has.) But the family probably needed more space than Berisch had as a single man, and the reunited Felligs soon took another apartment, on the Lower East Side, in a rear tenement at 52 Pitt Street.
That address tells you a lot about the family's financial status. A rear tenement, or "backhouse," was a building in the backyard of another, built to double the owner's income from a small plot of land. Access was usually via the street-facing tenement: to enter the second building, you went in the front door of the first, through a narrow tunnel-like hallway, and out a back door into the yard. The rent in a rear tenement was lower, and so was the quality of life. A backhouse had the unpleasant quality of cutting residents off from the street while offering almost no privacy. The joke popularized by Henny Youngman conveys it:
WOMAN (TO NEIGHBOR): Do you see what's going on in Poland?
NEIGHBOR: I don't see anything. I live in the back.
The six Felligs occupied two rooms, over a bakery. And although you may imbue that arrangement with a little romance — fresh bread, sweet-smelling pastry — it was terrible. Bakeries on the Lower East Side were notoriously dirty, infested with rats and bugs. In fact, Samuel Goldstein, the baker downstairs from the Felligs, was implicated the next year in a racket wherein he'd been buying rotten eggs from crooked dealers. In the summer, the heat rising from the ovens made life in the building miserable. About the only thing the Felligs' apartment had going for it was a hall toilet rather than the outhouses many tenements still had. Just a few years earlier, both front and rear buildings at 52 Pitt Street had been cited by the city's Tenement House Department for "unsanitary conditions" and "want of repair" — and given the conditions considered acceptable at the time, it had to have been pretty bad. Nor was it an especially happy home. Arthur was still angry at his father over the fake-currency confusion, and the rotten conditions into which they'd arrived surely didn't help. Father and son never really got along again. "You don't look back on this life," Arthur Fellig recalled in his old age. "You want to forget it."
Still, the neighborhood, rough as it was, constituted a support system. This slice of the Lower East Side was full of Galician Jews, speaking Polish and Yiddish. There was a mikvah, a ritual bathhouse, across the street. These four blocks of Pitt Street contained nine synagogues and Landsmanshaften, the mutual-aid societies that helped old-country Jews hang on in the New World. One synagogue was right next door, at 54 Pitt, its congregation mostly from Krakow. Another, about two blocks away, on Ridge Street, was called Machzikei Hadath Anshei Zlotshov and was populated by immigrants from the very town the Felligs had just left; indeed, its presence may have been why Berisch and Rivka took the apartment they did.
For immigrant children in 1909, there was no English as a Second Language program in the schools. Besides, with kids from Italy, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Germany, and a dozen other Balkan and Baltic countries, such classes would have been a babel of their own. Instead, the greenhorns, as everyone called the newcomers, were tossed in and got more or less the same lessons everyone else did. Most learned, with difficulty, to swim rather than sink.
Arthur was a quick study. Less than eight months after he arrived in America, a census taker listed him as an English speaker, and with the German, Polish, and Yiddish he already knew, he would be able to handle himself in multiple worlds. (He had a great felicity with words and lost himself in books, he said, reading late into the night in his crowded bed.) He was not, however, primed for the tough world he currently occupied. Although he was smart, most of all he was shy.
The standard Lower East Side tale, repeated in so many families, has the patriarch starting with a pushcart and making his way up to a storefront and then maybe a bigger business, and seeing his life grow easier and his children grow up in comfort, climbing society's ladder. It happened this way sometimes, but not for Bernard Fellig. He struggled merely to earn enough for the family, and often came up short. His son tells us that he tried to sell dishes before the High Holidays, when housewives often needed a second set in order to keep kosher. It was heavy, tiring work, especially in bad weather, and Bernard Fellig did not naturally have the hustling, hondeling instincts of a great salesman. He could scrape by, but no more.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Flash by Christopher Bonanos. Copyright © 2018 Christopher Bonanos. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B074ZR3ZLK
- Publisher : Henry Holt and Co. (June 5, 2018)
- Publication date : June 5, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 116512 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 402 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #334,823 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10 in Photojournalism (Kindle Store)
- #21 in Individual Photographers eBooks
- #84 in City Photography
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Christopher Bonanos](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/udgcf1vq0a1nhe9tlfbkuc7sgg._SY600_.jpg)
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book well-researched and enjoyable to read. They appreciate the vivid biography of a true character with facts about his life and work. The story is interesting at the beginning, but some felt it got tedious at chapter 10. The writing quality is described as excellent, comprehensive, and empathetic. The photos by Weegee are also appreciated.
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Customers find the book engaging and well-researched. They appreciate the true biography of an older period without embellishment. The book provides an interesting portrait of an artist as an anti-artist.
"...Mr. Bonanos clearly has done extensive research into the man and his passion for telling the visual stories of countless New Yorkers with a million..." Read more
"An interesting portrait of a artist as anti-artist who lived the life on his subjects and related events, elevating the milieu to in many instances..." Read more
"...If you just like a well written and researched biography, buy this book. If you’ve read this far, get the book. You won’t be disappointed!!" Read more
"...Not because the writing is bad. It’s not. But because the subject becomes so dissolute that you just want it to end...." Read more
Customers enjoy this biography of Weegee. They find it well-written and informative, with plenty of details about his life and work. The book also provides a glimpse into the New York newspapers of the time.
"This is a well-written and vivid biography of one of the hardest-working professional photographers of the 20th Century...." Read more
"...There are plenty of facts about Weegee’s life, facts about individual photos and when and how they were taken, facts about the world Weegee came from..." Read more
"...is perfect, but this book digs pretty deep into the life and mystique of Weegee and comes close to that elusive goal of perfection...." Read more
"Great book about Weegee the famous! From his start in New York to his time in California." Read more
Customers find the story engaging at the beginning. They appreciate the depth of exploration into the life and mystique of Weegee. However, some found the book tedious after chapter 10.
"..."FLASH: The Making of WEEGEE THE FAMOUS" is as fresh and charming a story as I've read in years...." Read more
"...It's a complex story, following Weegee's rise from fairly low-status jobs in newspaper darkrooms to becoming the premier crime photographer in the..." Read more
"...It was a perfect time to have been Weegee: it was a time for Flash." Read more
"...There's a great movie based on this amazing tale as well as several more books, including Weegee's own autobiography, and everything simply works..." Read more
Customers find the writing quality good. They say it's comprehensive and empathetic.
"...The writing is witty, informed and confident...." Read more
"This is a well-written and vivid biography of one of the hardest-working professional photographers of the 20th Century...." Read more
"Simply put, this is a wonderful book. Extremely well written, comprehensive, not sympathetic but empathetic given the time period and environment..." Read more
"...Beautifully written, it tells the touching, gross, and hilarious story of a true original: a guy with a camera - and an approach to using it - that..." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's photos and research on Weegee. They find the book well-researched and a true depiction of a photography icon.
"...Mr. Bonanos has crafted a true picture of a photography icon and documented the hard work and dedication he brought to becoming successful in a..." Read more
"...There are plenty of facts about Weegee’s life, facts about individual photos and when and how they were taken, facts about the world Weegee came from..." Read more
"A lot of good photos by Weegee in this volume and a well-researched book on his life and career, and snapshot ofd the news industry of the era" Read more
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![Just finished this WONDERFUL book in one sitting while on vacation in Spain.](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/transparent-pixel._V192234675_.gif)
Just finished this WONDERFUL book in one sitting while on vacation in Spain.
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2018As a New Yorker that's seen and heard just about every classic New York Story, Christopher Bonanos's "FLASH: The Making of WEEGEE THE FAMOUS" is as fresh and charming a story as I've read in years. It's actually amazing there hasn't already been a biography written about one of the most iconic and eccentric news photographers of the golden age of newspapers. Mr. Bonanos clearly has done extensive research into the man and his passion for telling the visual stories of countless New Yorkers with a million stories to tell. The writing is witty, informed and confident. I particularly appreciated the background on what was happening in NYC politically, economically, socially through Prohibition, the Great Depression and beyond, all the while WEEGEE (Arthur Fellig) was making an international name for himself navigating the red tape and fierce competition in the world of journalism. "FLASH: The Making of WEEGEE THE FAMOUS" would make a fantastic film. Kudos!
5.0 out of 5 starsAs a New Yorker that's seen and heard just about every classic New York Story, Christopher Bonanos's "FLASH: The Making of WEEGEE THE FAMOUS" is as fresh and charming a story as I've read in years. It's actually amazing there hasn't already been a biography written about one of the most iconic and eccentric news photographers of the golden age of newspapers. Mr. Bonanos clearly has done extensive research into the man and his passion for telling the visual stories of countless New Yorkers with a million stories to tell. The writing is witty, informed and confident. I particularly appreciated the background on what was happening in NYC politically, economically, socially through Prohibition, the Great Depression and beyond, all the while WEEGEE (Arthur Fellig) was making an international name for himself navigating the red tape and fierce competition in the world of journalism. "FLASH: The Making of WEEGEE THE FAMOUS" would make a fantastic film. Kudos!Just finished this WONDERFUL book in one sitting while on vacation in Spain.
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2018
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2022An interesting portrait of a artist as anti-artist who lived the life on his subjects and related events, elevating the milieu to in many instances high art. Weegie was without knowing it (or perhaps knowing all along) was helping to shape through his photography a multi-faceted culture of inner city lives and events that would have been lost and/or devoid of honor and integrity if not for his creative mind and humanistic, earthen soul. In his later years when he diverged across many different visual and cultural domains, we see the essence of an iconoclast and an original who manipulated and was manipulated by the shifting of the times that define the present for better or worse while relegating the past as both a bygone era and forcing one to realize that they are no longer relevant and thus forgotten, despite efforts and energies to the contrary.
Weegie was a complex man made up of a broken mosaic held loosely together by a single personal dynamic to visualize and record lives and a world that reflected an equally broken mosaic loosely held together by the tumult of humanity.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2018There are books I hate to end, and books I can’t wait to finish. This biography of Weegee the Famous, the groundbreaking press photographer turned charicature, belongs in a special category — books I thought I’d never finish. Not because the writing is bad. It’s not. But because the subject becomes so dissolute that you just want it to end. Weegee made the rules, then distorted and rewrote them, and finally just succumbed to his own press releases. Uplifting and sad at the same time. I could put it down ... but didn’t.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2020This is a well-written and vivid biography of one of the hardest-working professional photographers of the 20th Century. This is also the story of a man who was incredibly skilled at news photography and pursued what is now known as personal branding to an extreme degree, going from admirable hustler Arthur Fellig to boastful and overbearing Weegee. It's a complex story, following Weegee's rise from fairly low-status jobs in newspaper darkrooms to becoming the premier crime photographer in the United States in the 1940s, and then onwards to his seduction into Hollywood and his descent into trick photography and questionable outre projects.
Throughout, while author Christopher Bonanos gladly debunks many of Weegee's oft-repeated self-mythologizing, he also lends a considerable amount of sympathy to a largely self-educated immigrant whose appearance, accent, and lack of WASP decorum led to him being a punchline to many mainstreamers even at the height of his fame. This never devolves into armchair psychoanalysis, but one gets the sense from reading this book that much of Weegee's pushiness and misogyny were covers for a deep-seated loneliness. He certainly comes across as misunderstood, and seems to have been a man whose work was primarily his life.
Truth be told, Weegee is a very hard figure to get a handle on, and it hasn't gotten easier with the many Weegee museum retrospectives over the past 20 years. But Bonanos is the first I've read who doesn't try to make the claim that everything Weegee did was high art, or that he was the "American Brassai" or other high-sounding claims. Bonanos gives enough room in most chapters for Weegee to breathe, and places him within the context of changing trends in newspaper and magazine publication in the United States. I can't say that I feel as though I finally know Weegee, but I certainly feel much closer to his essence than I did seeing his old photos at several gallery shows.
One important last note. While many Weegee photos are reproduced in this book, the reproductions themselves are not of the highest quality. This is a biography, not an art book. If you're looking for a coffee table book of Weegee's crime photos, you'll have to go elsewhere. But if you're looking for a true biography of the man, this is the only show in town.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2021Simply put, this is a wonderful book. Extremely well written, comprehensive, not sympathetic but empathetic given the time period and environment that Weegee lived in. It’s so nice to read a truthful biography of someone from an earlier period without overlays of condescension based on “today’s standards”. Mr. Bonanos has crafted a true picture of a photography icon and documented the hard work and dedication he brought to becoming successful in a difficult environment. If you like pre and post WWII era NYC history, buy this book. If you like general photography history, buy this book. If you like street photography, buy this book NOW. If you just like a well written and researched biography, buy this book. If you’ve read this far, get the book. You won’t be disappointed!!
Top reviews from other countries
- ResgerrReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 4, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Great read about the life of Weegee. I learnt alot I didn't know about him.
- Richard BelfryReviewed in Canada on May 24, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book!
I have almost finished this excellent book. It is a very entertaining look at a very interesting man living in interesting times. I have long been a fan of Weegee's work. Highly recommend this book to his fans, those interested in the beginnings of photojournalism and of early to mid century New York and Hollywood.