Weegee (1899 -1968) Google Images

Street credit .

Weegee made beautiful black and white photographs for newspapers and magazines. Many of his images contain precursors of by now standard film or photography language. His attention for the surrounding of his subject matter made for a dense packaging of information in his images, which was ideal for photojournalism. The tricks of the trade which he found, applied and popularized are many, and can be seen as an early exploration of the possibilities of the medium of photography, and hence his importance for an analysis of contemporary photography.

(Weegee had a retrospective show in Maillol Museum in Paris in 2007. "Weegee". It was a rare collection of photographs from a period of about ten years before the end of the second world war, and it showed the versatility of a technically very skilled photographer, who manages to acquire balance in snapshots, and immediacy in staged photographs.)

Copyright text 2007, by Jan Troost