Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur (Usher) Fellig, a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in Manhattan, New York City's Lower East Side as a press photographer during the 1930s and 1940s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick. Describing his beginnings, Weegee said: In my particular case I didn't wait 'til somebody gave me a job or something, I went and created a job for myself—freelance photographer. And what I did, anybody else can do. What I did simply was this: I went down to Manhattan Police Headquarters and for two years I worked without a police card or any kind of credentials. When a story came over a police teletype, I would go to it. The idea was I sold the pictures to the newspapers. And naturally, I picked a story that meant something In 1957, after developing diabetes, he moved in with Wilma Wilcox, a Quaker social worker whom he had known since the 1940s, and who cared for him and then cared for his work. He traveled extensively in Europe until 1968, working for the Daily Mirror and on a variety of photography, film, lecture, and book projects. On December 26, 1968, Weegee died in New York at the age of 69. He gained the nickname “Weegee” from the Ouija board, events would happen. A couple of his photos seemed to prove it — like when he photographed a wino lying on the sidewalk, who then gets up, crosses the street, gets run over by a car and is given last rites by a priest; then there was the streetcorner in Chinatown that Weegee photographed moments before a gas main blew and the street caved in. undefined

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