WEEGEE, On the Spot, 1940

In 1964 Andy Warhol decorated the facade of the New York State Pavilion at that year's World's Fair in Flushing Meadow, New York, with a series of silk-screened re-presentations of criminals wanted by the City Police. He titled the work Thirteen Most Wanted Men. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the images were deemed unacceptable by the Fair's organisers and Warhol ended up covering them over in his signature silver paint.

Warhol's gesture can now be read in all kinds of ways. Since the images were essentially mug shots, his re-use of such imagery could be seen as an ironic nod to a tradition preoccupied with the physiognomic indicators of criminality that went back to the likes of Francis Galton and Alfonse Bertillon in the nineteenth century. At the same time Warhol probably had in mind a 'rectified readymade' by one of his key artist nic role models, Marcel Duchamp, who, in 1923, had glued mug shots of himself onto a spoof WANTED $2000 REWARD poster.

There is, however, one central reference point for the gesture which has so far remained virtually unexamined. This is the work of the great exponent of the image of the criminal in twentieth century American photography, Weegee. Given that other allusions to Weegee's themes occur throughout Warhol's work, it seems it is high time these apparently dissimilar figures were convincingly brought into proximity. This essay explores the question of the historical dialogue established by Warhol with Weegee and touches on a cluster of shared thematic issues, notably voyeurism, trauma, fame and criminality. For contemporary audiences Warhol is considerably better known than Weegee. The essay begins, then, with an introduction to Weegee in historical terms and shows how his preoccupations as a photographer dovetail with certain cultural shifts in the period since World War II. It ends by returning to the subject of Warhol and his Most Wanted Men.

Introducing Weegee

The name Weegee was made up. Stories differ, but it derived either from his role as a 'squeegee boy' in the darkrooms of the New York Times in the early 1920s (squeegees were used to remove excess water from photographic prints prior to drying) or from the craze at the time for the Ouija board, whose supposedly occult powers of divination Weegee was said to possess. In the latter respect, Weegee's rise to prominence as a photographer was bound up with a hustler's opportunistic and street-wise instincts : there was nothing particularly mystical or occult involved. He had been born Usher (later Arthur) Fellig in 1899 to Jewish parents in the small town of Zlothev (formerly in Austria and now part of Ukraine) The family moved to America, or more particularly the immigrant ghettos of New York's Lower East Side, when Weegee was ten. Fleeing family hardships, he left home early and schooled himself in photographic technique as much through economic necessity as aesthetic vocation. He worked for years as a darkroom assistant first at the New York Times and then at Acme Newspictures, an agency which supplied photographs to a number of the leading New York tabloids. (…)