Weegee, “At an East Side Murder,” ca. 1943 (copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography
WEEGEE: MURDER IS MY BUSINESS
International Center of Photography
1133 Sixth Ave. at West 43rd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 2, $12 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 5:00 – 8:00)
212-857-0000
www.icp.org
A true New York City original, Ukraine-born Usher “Arthur” Fellig, better known as Weegee, revolutionized the art of photojournalism during the 1930s and ’40s. A freelance photographer who used a police-band radio to often get to crime scenes before the NYPD, Weegee snapped black-and-white pictures of murder victims, fires, and other tragedies, capturing not only the dead bodies but interested bystanders as well as friends and family of the deceased. His emotion-packed photos, which appeared in daily newspapers and magazines, gave viewers the feeling that they were there at the scene, his use of flash illuminating his subjects in the foreground against a dark, gritty background. ICP chief curator Brian Wallis has gathered together more than one hundred photos for the exciting exhibition “Weegee: Murder Is My Business.” Named after a show Weegee held of his work at the Photo League in 1941 — which is re-created here, along with a room in his studio — “Murder Is My Business” features shots of dead bodies lying lonely on the street, chalk outlines, rubbernecking crowds, firemen going into burning buildings, and a policeman holding a pair of rescued kittens. Weegee also took photos of New York nightlife and street scenes, including a New Year’s Eve party at Sammy’s Bar, two smiling Bowery entertainers, a Santa Claus balloon being inflated for the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and huge crowds at Coney Island. There is also a fun series, “Weegee Procedural,” in which Weegee photographed himself being handcuffed, taken to a station house, posing for a mug shot, and ending up behind bars. ICP debunks the idea that Weegee got his name from a Ouija board because of his ability to magically appear at scenes before anyone else; according to the exhibit text, the name actually came from when he was a squeegee boy at a photo house. Arranged thematically, the photos offer a thrilling look at a New York gone by and will have visitors crowding around not unlike the people seen in much of Weegee’s work. (ICP will be hosting a series of “Weegee’s Night Walks” through Times Square, the Bowery, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Lower Manhattan from February 24 through March 30; registration is $75.)
Weegee, “Self Portrait,” vintage gelatin silver mounted to board, ca. 1945
WEEGEE: NAKED CITY
Stephen Kasher Gallery
521 West 23rd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through February 25, free, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-966-3978
www.stevenkasher.com
In conjunction with “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea is presenting “Weegee: Naked City,” comprising more than 125 prints that reveal Weegee’s wide-ranging subject matter. In his 1945 tome, Naked City, Weegee wrote, “For the pictures in this book I was on the scene; sometimes drawn there by some power I can’t explain, and I caught the New Yorkers with their masks off . . . not afraid to Laugh, Cry, or make Love. What I felt I photographed, laughing and crying with them.” The exhibit does include a handful of photos that are also in the ICP show, and it does not have any accompanying text, but there is still lots to see: shots of a woman in tears at a Frank Sinatra concert, famous clown Emmett Kelly sadly waving his hat, children crammed into a tenement penthouse, advertising signs, Stanley Kubrick on the set of Dr. Strangelove, a close-up of a woman’s stockinged leg at the Bowery Savings Bank, a big dog in a Greenwich Village hangout, and several experimental self-portraits using multiple images. Together, they offer a fabulous adventure through the New York of old. “The people in these photographs are real,” Weegee went on to explain in Naked City. “To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.”
In 1999, L.A.-based French shopkeeper and amateur videographer Thierry Guetta discovered that he was related to street artist Invader and began filming his cousin putting up his tile works. Guetta, who did not know much about art, soon found himself immersed in the underground graffiti scene. On adventures with such famed street artists as Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Ron English, and Borf, Guetta took thousands of hours of much-sought-after video. The amateur videographer was determined to meet Banksy, the anarchic satirist who has been confounding authorities around the world with his striking, politically sensitive works perpetrated right under their noses, from England to New Orleans to the West Bank. Guetta finally gets his wish and begins filming the seemingly unfilmable as Banksy, whose identity has been a source of controversy for more than a decade, allows Guetta to follow him on the streets and invites him into his studio. But as he states at the beginning of his brilliant documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy—who hides his face from the camera in new interviews and blurs it in older footage—turns the tables on Guetta, making him the subject of this wildly entertaining film.
In the late 1970s, Andrea Callard helped found a collective of artists that would come to be known as Colab, or Collaborative Projects, Inc. Among her fellow officers in the group were Coleen Fitzgibbons, Tom Otterness, and Ulli Rimkus. “Through a juicy and conflicted multi-year period of identity and structural definition,” she explains on her website, “there was experimentation in and rich discussion of accessible content, political forces, technology, equity, corporate versus union models, and material resources.” From February 13 to 19, the Maysles Institute will look back at Callard’s career by presenting the world premiere of her first feature-length film, Talking Landscape: Early Media Work, 1974-1984, which examines all those things and more in its eighty minutes. More a greatest-hits package than a narrative nonfiction film, Talking Landscape consists of several of Callard’s low-budget, low-tech Super 8 shorts, narrated in her steady deadpan, beginning with 11 thru 12, in which Callard humorously discusses “inspiration, information, transportation, the National Geographic, the Yellow Pages, and taxi cabs” while standing at an ironing board, trying to hail a cab out on the street, and walking on her hands in the ocean. In Notes on Ailanthus, she details the history of the tree that “grows abundantly in all the empty spaces around New York.” In Sound Windows, she has fun with her apartment windows. In Walking Outside, she sings a blues song while walking through green fields. Talking Landscape also includes a trio of slide shows of site-specific installations Callard was involved in. Commuting from Point to Point combines images shot in Paris, Italy, and New York with phrases lifted from books; for example a shot of cigarettes put out in a bowl of dirt on a newspaper is accompanied by the words “only time gets lost,” while a photo of the Spanish Steps features the phrase “worn by millions of feet.” The Customs House is a document of the 1979 Creative Time group show “Custom and Culture 2,” held inside the dilapidated Customs House by Bowling Green, now home to the National Museum of the American Indian. And finally, The Times Square Show takes viewers on a tour of the seminal art show held in June 1980, which sought to investigate “the need to communicate in a larger world”; the Colab exhibition comprised works by Keith Haring, Lee Quinones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, John Ahearn, Kiki Smith, Otterness, Callard, and others held in the then-still-seedy neighborhood. Throughout the film, Callard displays a wry sense of humor in these brief experimental works that were part of a major shift in the New York City art scene. Talking Landscape is being screened as part of the Maysles Institute’s continuing “Documentary in Bloom” series, curated by Livia Bloom, who will moderate Q&As with Callard following the February 16 and 19 showings.
