Anvers: Weegee -Murder is my business - The Eye of Photography Magazine

Thanks to the pugnacity of Fomu curators, Weegee’s fans in Europe are able to fulfil their appetite for crime and film noir scenes… Last year, ICP featured an impressive «retrospective» in New York of Weegee’s work called Murder is my Business, replacing the photographer as well as his photographs, in its chronological, professional as well as historical context. That is what is shown in Antwerp in a clear, didactic and superb scenography.

The consequent amount of pictures, as well as the newspapers, the images from other photographers, including some comparative display with the NYPD photographs, and other precious documents like his voice recordings or this very cute Super 8 film he shot for himself on Coney Island, surely do the trick.

The focus of Murder is my Business was to give a full idea of Weeggee’s best years as a street photographer. The New York years where, night after night, he documented the violent pulse of the city, building his own and New York City’s legend in bulbed black and white light. Bourbon, gangsters, alive or dead, hookers, workers full of hope and misery, all struggling not to be eaten too quickly by their beloved city, all these images provide 10 years of an intimate diary collectively shared by millions of New Yorkers.

Wandering in the huge and industrial hall of the museum, the chronological display helps to understand why Weegee had a great influence on photographers like Diane Arbus or other street photographers of the sixties. It is impossible not to think about William Klein when facing the 1941 image “Their First murder”… The exhibition gives also a deep and precise glimpse of New York in these days. Mob, crime, violence and of course the hard life of the “People of New York”, immigrants like him who were far from the upper rooms of the Fifth Avenue skyscrapers. In addition to the exceptional sense of Weegee’s «mise en scene», what is touching is that there is a great deal of irony and tenderness in his pictures. It is as if he wanted to show and share the absurdity of life as well as the beauty of humans taken in the great wheel of fate and destiny.

In the 1958 LP “Famous Photographers Tell How”, Weegee talked about his work (not his art) mixing, as always, facts with home-made rumors to tailor his image, but when the interviewer commented about his book Naked city saying that his pictures were like New York, “beautiful, sad and funny”, Weegee answered immediately with his voice, harshened by life and cigars:

“Don’t forget it’s human”

Read the full story in the French version of le journal

Matthieu Wolmark

Murder is my Business
Weegee
Until January 27th, 2013
FoMu
Waalsekaai 47
2000 Anvers
Belgium
tél.: +32 (0)3 242 93 00
fax: +32 (0)3 242 93 10
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 6pm.