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Weegee

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
pseud. of Arthur Fellig, 1899–1968, American photojournalist, b. Zolochiv, Ukraine (then in Austria-Hungary) as Asher Fellig. His family immigrated (1910) to New York City, where he soon quit school, held various photography-related jobs, and worked for Acme Newspictures (later part of United Press International) until 1935. For the next decade he freelanced, selling photos mainly to New York tabloids. About 1938 he adopted the name Weegee, supposedly a phonetic version of the name of the Ouija board, in tribute to his seemingly clairvoyant ability to arrive where and when news was breaking (he monitored the police radio). With his big, flash-popping Speed Graphic, the cigar-chomping photographer became a fixture of the New York night. Drawn to the grotesque and illicit, he created high-contrast black-and-white shots of grisly crime scenes, fires, and car crashes and of New Yorkers at pleasure spots and grim scenes. He transformed these frequently bloody classics of photojournalism…
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Full text Article Weegee

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
(12 June 1899–26 December 1968; b. Usher/Arthur H. Fellig) A naturalized New Yorker of Polish birth, he adopted the name Weegee by Americanizing the orthography of the “Ouija” board and liked to call himself “Weegee the Famous,” which would be an embarrassing claim, were it not indeed prominent, at…
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Full text Article Weegee

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
pseud. of Arthur Fellig, 1899–1968, American photojournalist, b. Zolochiv, Ukraine (then in Austria-Hungary) as Asher Fellig. His family immigrated (1910) to New York City, where he soon quit school, held various photography-related jobs, and worked for Acme Newspictures (later part of United Press…
| 305 words
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Full text Article Weegee

From Chambers Biographical Dictionary
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Full text Article Weegee

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
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Full text Article Surreptitious Photography

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
It seems that the first great advance in the art development of the technology new to the 19th century came from taking pictures of people unaware that they were being photographed. While the identity of the photographer(s) initially discovering this possibility is probably unknown, among its…
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Full text Article Photography

From A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes
The initial measure of avant-garde photography is doing what common photographers don't (and probably can't) make. Among the many options have been overexposure, underexposure, multiple exposure (COBURN), superimposition, photograms made without a camera (MAN RAY, MOHOLY-NAGY), millisecond exposure…
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Full text Article Fellig Arthur

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
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Full text Article 1938

From The Hutchinson Chronology of World History Full text Article 1938
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Henri Cartier-Bresson's first Leica camera (model...
Documentary photography and photojournalism emerged in the late nineteenth century as effective ways to present contemporary realities to large, primarily white, middle-class publics in a direct and vividly appealing form. Although all photographs can be considered documents in some sense, …
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THE AMERICAN JITTERS In 1932 Edmund Wilson published The American Jitters : A Year of the Slump . For a year he had wandered the United States as a roving reporter for the New Republic; now he distilled his wide-ranging view into a compact, frightening study of a nation in disorder. Wilson recorded…
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