Weegee photographed crime scenes in the 1940s, often when people died. Most times, he showed up at the scene of the crime before the police did. I believe Jack Wilgus told us in history of photo that Weegee had his own police radio.
p.s. will someone please buy me this book?
http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Beauty-Memorial-Photography-America/dp/0942642325
The photographs of Weegee are amazing! When I worked at the photography museum in Amsterdam we had a Weegee exhibition and i'm a very big fan of his work. If you ever have the opportunity to go to an exhibition of his work you really should go! His vintage prints are really amazing.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that Weegee had a radio in the back of his car. He was the first photographer that was allowed to have a police radio and that's why most of the pictures are taken before the ambulance/police are at the scene. Weegee was specialized in photographing nights and worked mostly between 10 pm and 5 am. He took a lot of pictures in NY.
We had a workshop for school groups that was called What's your story? This workshop wasn't just for this exhibition but we used it for this one as well. It's about kids who make up their own story with a picture. Weegee's pictures were very good for this workshop.
You can look at: http://www.whatsyourstory.nu/
The site is in dutch but if you click on fotoverhalen you can see and listen to all the stories (also in dutch).
What we did during the workshop:
We asked the kids to come up with a story that goes with one of the pictures and let them ask questions like: what happend 1 second ago, what will happen in 2 minutes, what happens outside the frame of the picture etc. After they made up a story with one of the questions we would record the story on a ipod and would make a sort of podcast of it.
I think this is a nice way of teaching children to look better at a picture (and i think it also works with other artwork).