The Human Parade

No New Yorker was safe from Weegee's lens — not the grieving widow, the flirting husband, destitute children or drunks on the Bowery as they were bundled into a police wagon. And the Big Apple crime photographer named Usher Fellig, later anglicized to Arthur Fellig but internationally famous under his two-syllable pseudonym, is set to haunt the public again with his [an error occurred while processing this directive]revealing and sometimes macabre images. "Unknown Weegee" will appear at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City from June 9 to Aug. 27.

The exhibit is drawn from the ICP's collection of 20,000 of his original prints from the 1930s to the 1950s, and will showcase over 100 of his rarely seen images, including his often gruesome tabloid-documentarist style: murder victims sprawled on boardwalks covered with bloody drop cloths; crime-scene chalk drawings on sidewalks of bodies since removed. One can easily imagine him driving around the dark streets of New York City of old, waiting for his self-installed police radio to propel him into action. But it wasn't just crime that captured his attention: the despair and shell shock of the Depression in America and the absurd opulence of the country's postwar era both inspired him. In one image, a young couple dances in a "voodoo trance" (ca. 1956); in another, a burlesque showgirl whose glorious body drips with glitter sips water backstage. Weegee's pursuit of regular people in their mundane vulnerability and well-knowns such as glamour model Bettie Page and actress Eva Gabor created a body of work that became emblematic of all New Yorkers, native and transplanted: the average, the wealthy, the hurting, the dead.