Weegee the Famous: The Making of Myth in the Time of Murder Inc.

Weegee the Famous, or Usher Fellig, was a talented newspaper photographer operating in the late 1930’s and early ’40’s in New York City, who accumulated a cult-like status, and who remains an enigma within the art historical world. Weegee was rumored to have had psychic powers, fan propaganda that he never once refuted but enthusiastically encouraged, and he often spoke of the tingling feeling he would receive when a murder was committed. Weegee was famous for his "night rides" prowling around the lower East Side of Manhattan searching for a crime scene, and in the hey-day of Murder Inc. fresh murders or “spot killings” were not hard to come by. The man culminated a cult-like following both in life and after his death for these very “myths” which he himself actively formed, but scholars of art history have been, and currently are, very split on the debate of where this man belongs in their canon. The debate revolves around two camps of thought between more recent publications declaring that Weegee contributed largely to both the practice of photography and the profession of photojournalism, and the opposition of traditional photography surveys that simply chalk him up to a brash immigrant who got lucky and has maybe one or two significant photographs in his entire oeuvre. His complete anonymity, as well as the mentality that he just got lucky, stems from his move to Southern California in order to fully pursue the identity of an artist. This moment where Weegee chose to pursue the myth that his contemporaries had pinned to him as the “genius artist” is the exact moment all of art history denounced him as a fraud. Weegee actively took part in the making of his own myth and legend in order to be remembered throughout art history, so why are we just now re-discovering his photographs as defining examples of Depression era Americana? This thesis deals directly with this question, and the tensions within the world of art history that has kept this influential photographer from being able to receive due recognition. By outlining the history of both the man, and his active creation of his own myth, and the scholarship done on him and his body of work, this thesis works to illustrate the meteoric rise of a cult status genius, his erasure from art history, and his subsequent metaphoric re-discovery within the past two decades as a mythic icon.