Christopher Bonanos, the city editor of New York magazine, wrote an essay on Weegee in the new re-release of the photographer’s 1945 landmark book, Naked City. He explains that, when Weegee was starting out, he was an outsider in the photography world. “There was no sense that his photos were art,” he tells BBC Culture. These were news photos shot for the Herald-Tribune, the Daily News, and the Post, among others. And yet, the Museum of Modern Art acquired five Weegee works in 1943, and Stanley Kubrick hired him as a stills photographer on Dr Strangelove. “As his career progressed, people started to see the power in these pictures,” Bonanos explains. “They realised that, if you put them up on the wall against a pure white surface, they hold up.”
In his early days as a freelancer, Weegee struggled to get by. He paid $17 a month for a tiny apartment, and earned just five dollars a photo. But as his ability to smell stories grew stronger, so did his ability to hustle. Around 1941, he began using a rubber stamp that credited his photos as Weegee the Famous. “He was not famous, he just decided that he was,” explains Bonanos, shedding light on the photographer’s fake-it-til-you-make-it ethos. “He talked himself up extremely well.”