History • ‘Malcom
X,’ a photo taken by photographer
Bob Adelman in 1963, is one of many
photos on exhibit at the Getty Museum
in Los Angeles. The exhibit will run
through January. The Getty Museum
‘ American Visions,’ depicts America through the lens
By
Katie De Boer
Online Forty-Niner
Staff Writer
The Los Angeles Getty Center presents “American
Visions,” a special
showcase of four exhibits featuring some of the finest photographers and memorable
images that span 75 years of American photography. The exhibits feature images
by photographers Paul Strandk, Robert Capa and Weegee the Famous. Two of the
four exhibits, “Scene of the Crime: Photo by Weegee and Pictures for
the Press,” entertain with excellent insights and images of the 20th
century that helped shape the world today.
“
Scene of the Crime: Photo by Weegee” presents two decades of headline-making
news images from freelance photographer Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), who later
popularized himself as “Weegee.” As an unshaven, dark haired, cigar-smoking
Austrian, Weegee dominated news media in the 1930s and 1940s with photos of
sensationalism or human interest. Scenes of murders, fires, riots and accidents
were a more than entertainment for the common man in the mid-1900s, they were
the reason to pick up a newspaper or read the monthly journal.
“
Weegee’s images fired the imagination of a nation fed by Hollywood, the
tabloid and large dose of pulp fiction. The crime photographer was seen as
part of an alluring group of Depression-era celebrities, including mobsters
and detectives who seemed to live exciting lives,” said Judith Keller,
curator of the exhibition.
“
Scene of the Crime” covers the most famous of Weegee’s works which
began in 1935 in New York, where he lived in a loft next to a police station.
He would spend his nights responding to the police radio and obtaining tips
from nearby residents or reporters. He used a speed graphic camera and, later,
an infrared camera to capture the late night events. He would develop the pictures
in a nearby subway, in the backseat of a car, or wherever he could set up shop,
and then quickly race to editors to sell his images for the next morning’s
paper.
Weegee’s approach was absolutely direct, brash and head-on. He never
let any of the often horrific scenes he came upon affect him; he just went
in and shot the picture. He looked and lived rather like a film gangster, and
called himself “ The World’s Greatest Photographer.”
Weegee became the Hollywood stereotype for the photographer. It was as if he
went to Hollywood and never recovered, producing some work, which is often
painful to observe.
“
Weegee created a visual culture indicated with photo and composition not done
by the work of an artist but an innovator,” said Mary Beth-Carosello,
an exhibit educator. Carosello also commented on Weegee’s softer side.
He would capture couples kissing, people dancing, and the circus. When Weegee
died in 1968, he left more than 20,000 prints spanning his career.
The second exhibit, “Pictures for the Press,” went a step further
in depicting society the way Weegee did. It presents 35 photographs of memorable
news images from the late 1940s to the 1970s, depicting war, politics and the
civil rights struggle through various artists. Many of the images were acquired
through the archives of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Covering three decades, images dominated one third of newspaper space in a
period when the printed page controlled news for a majority of Americans. Photographers
such as Robert Capa, famous for his images from WWII and the Invasion of France,
Barbara Gluck, famous for images of the Vietnam War, and Boris Yarow and Robert
Jackson, who both captured the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Lee
Harvey Oswald.
The “Pictures for the Press” and “Scene of the Crime: Photo
by Weegee,” exhibits at the Getty Center offer a powerful look at the
work of photojournalism at its best. They offer insight to the history of America
capturing the tragedies and dramas of the 20th century. The exhibits will be
open till Jan. 22, 2006.
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