Arthur Fellig, the prolific photographer and incidental social critic better known as Weegee, was highly regarded for his gritty street tableaus. He began working as a freelance news photographer in New York City in the 1930s, and had an uncanny penchant for arriving at crime scenes, fires or other disasters at just the right moment, getting just the right shot with his Speed Graphic camera.
(According to various accounts, it was this preternatural timing that led to his pseudonym, a phonetic spelling of Ouija, an allusion to clairvoyance.)
His considerable career, which spanned decades and even brought him to Hollywood in the late 1940s for a time, inspired the writer Christopher Bonanos, an editor at New York magazine, to write a biography of Fellig that was published in 2018: “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous.”
As Mr. Bonanos was gathering reference materials for his book, he examined a series of photographs from a collection at the International Center of Photography, taken of the interior of Weegee’s New York City apartment between 1937 and the mid-1940s. They showed Weegee’s bed and the wall behind it, covered with newspaper clippings.
Mr. Bonanos shared his account this week with Times Insider.
He scrutinized the photos of the papered wall in an attempt to identify the various clips. In one image, he could make out a page torn from The New York Post, with an article detailing the arrest of Harry Brunette, a bank robber and kidnapper. It featured a photo of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the scene of the police raid on West 102nd Street in Manhattan, where Mr. Brunette was apprehended.
The Times published its own article about the arrest, on Dec. 16, 1936, and used the same photograph. Mr. Bonanos, knowing The Times keeps a physical archive of articles, photographs and other materials, contacted the Morgue (the archive’s nickname) in 2017. He was curious about some Weegee photos the Morgue might have, including the one of Hoover.
The Times found it, in a photo folder for Hoover, though the image was not credited to Weegee. It was labeled an Associated Press photo.
According to Mr. Bonanos, it is highly unlikely that Weegee would have posted someone else’s photographs on his bedroom wall. He’s confident the image belongs to Weegee.
The Times discovered other photographs. One, in a folder marked “ships, disasters” was an image of the Finnish freighter Aurora, on fire in the Hudson River in 1941.
In print, the photo had been credited to The New York Times. But on the back, written in pencil, the name of the photographer is clear: Arthur Fellig.
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