Photography: Dames! Stiffs! Mugs!

Some photographers are the poets of purple mountains' majesty. Some are the poets of the placid suburbs. Weegee is the poet of small-timers who died facedown on a city pavement at 3 a.m. in a pool of their own blood. And petty mobsters. He was great at petty mobsters--half the guys in his pictures look as if their nickname was Mugsy. As one of the most unabashed tabloid-news photographers, Weegee was also supremely good at car crashes, dazed escapees from tenement fires, transvestites being hustled out of paddy wagons, and Peeping Tom shots of lovers wrestling in twos (and threes!) on the nighttime beach at Coney Island.

His prime years, from the mid-1930s to the late '40s, were the formative days of tabloid photography. The work Weegee did then makes up the better part of "Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama," the affecting and sizable (more than 200 prints) show on view at the International Center of Photography Midtown in New York City through Feb. 22. Accompanied by Weegee's World (Bulfinch; 262 pages; $75)--probably the fanciest book ever devoted to a man who generally had a cigar stuck in his mouth--the exhibit moves on later to Paris and London.

Think of Weegee as a chronological and psychological midpoint between two utterly different photographers. One is the turn-of-the-century muckraker Jacob Riis, who saw New York City as a social problem to be solved. The other is Diane Arbus, who found in the city life of the 1960s a psychic spectacle of creepy fascination. Weegee haunts the same kind of shabby neighborhoods that Riis did. But what goes on in Weegee's festive, suffering, unsanitary New York is a sight to be enjoyed more than clucked over. The tenements that preoccupied Riis, a moralist and social reformer, are taken for granted by Weegee, a melodramatist, who treats the city as no more than the staging ground for each night's blunt sensations.

At the same time, Weegee had begun to detect that freakish charge in the metropolitan air that would become the signature mood of Arbus' work. There's a feral quality in a lot of the good citizens of Weegee's New York. You catch it in the gleaming eyes of the kids at a crime scene in Their First Murder; these are children who are thrilled, or at the very least intrigued, by the sight of a dead body. In some of his other people there's a passivity that is no less unnerving. You see it in his picture of Irma Twiss Epstein, a nanny accused of killing a child in her care, whose weird serenity is the precursor of the affectless stare that fascinated Arbus.

There was something of the same slightly menacing feel in a lot of Riis' pictures too--in those gimlet-eyed men he showed lurking around the flophouses where he photographed. But Riis tried to reassure his middle-class audience that these people were "the other half," fishy characters or hapless unfortunates, but in either case nothing like themselves. Weegee knew that his tabloid readers were often not so different from the people in his pictures. And he was sufficiently unmoved by the pieties of concerned photography--let's just say that the nobility of the common man was not one of his big preoccupations--that he didn't hesitate to show people a picture of themselves in all their gamy glory.