WeegeeNaked city

Photographs: Weegee

Publisher: Essential Books

246 pages

Pictures: 239

Year: 1945

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Polish-born Arthur Felig, who immigrated to the United States in 1910 and taught himself photography, was dubbed “Ouija” by New York City cops in the 1930s for his uncanny ability to appear at crime scenes before the police did. A tabloid-news photographer for the Daily News, Herald Tribune and Post, Weegee in many ways created his own legend—“that of the cigar-chomping sensationalist paparazzo.” With the vivid photogravures assembled in Naked City, Weegee created a “photobook masterpiece… one of the great documentary photobooks… His Naked City is essentially a nocturnal book, to be put alongside Brassaï and Brandt… Beneath its Rabelaisian tough-guy exterior, this is a book with heart” (Parr & Badger I:145). When Naked City was adapted to the screen, Weegee “went to Hollywood to make several short films and to act in others. But he is best remembered as the chronicler of a particular place and time : New York City in the first half of the 20th century” (Roth, 118). As Earl Wilson put it, “Weegee is an O. Henry with a camera.”

Hardcover under dust jacket, 245 x 175 mm. First Edition, third printing, 1945. Gravure printing. Black & white photographs. Certainly, one of the most influential photography books of the twentieth century. Included in 101 Books, pp.118-19; Auer, p.307 ; The Open Book, pp.142-43 ; The Photobook, vol. I, p.145. Some tears and loss on dust jacket (see pictures). Copy yellowed, mostly at the edges. Inside is fine. Reproductions very well preserved. Attractive copy with rare original jacket!

Referenced in: The Photobook: A History - Volume I