Weegee and Naked City / Edition 1

by Anthony W. Lee, Richard W. Meyer

Overview

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and his 1945 photography book, Naked City—with its lurid tabloid-style images of Manhattan crime, crowds, and boisterous nightlife—changed prevailing journalistic practices almost overnight. In this volume, two art historians, Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer, bring markedly different outlooks on photography and modernism to their discussions of Weegee and his book. Meyer looks carefully at Weegee's pictures before and after they were collected and assesses how his practice of tabloid photography was inseparable from his own lowbrow appeal. Lee paints the vivid details of a leftist journalism world in 1930s and 1940s New York and shows how this world helped shape the photographer's vision. These essays restore the Naked City photographs to the mass circulation newspapers and magazines for which they were intended, and they trace the strange process by which the most famous of these pictures—suffused with blood, gore, and sensational crime—entered the museum.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520255906
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/02/2008
Series:	Defining Moments in Photography , #3
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Anthony W. Lee, Associate Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College, is the series editor for Defining Moments in American Photography and is coauthor (with Elizabeth Young) of On Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. He is also the author of Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco's Public Murals and Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco, all published by UC Press. Richard Meyer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Director of the Contemporary Project at the University of Southern California. In 2006-07, he served as the first Katherine Stein Sachs and Keith L. Sachs Visiting Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, the editor of Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions, and, with David Román, the co-editor of Art Works: Part I and II, two special issues of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is currently organizing an exhibition “Warhol's Jews” for the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and completing a book titled What was Contemporary Art?

Table of Contents

introduction

Learning from Low Culture
richard meyer

Human Interest Stories
anthony w. lee

notes
works cited
index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Gives more detail to Weegee's well-known evolution from freelance photographer to Hollywood celebrity."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

Gives more detail to Weegee’s well-known evolution from freelance photographer to Hollywood celebrity.

Choice