Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous

by Christopher Bonanos Narrated by Graham Halstead

Overview

National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography

The first definitive biography of Weegee the Famous-photographer, psychic, fiend-from Christoper Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid.

Arthur Fellig's ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he renamed himself “Weegee,” claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. In Flash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied.

From self-taught immigrant kid to newshound to art-world darling to latter-day caricature-moving from the dangerous streets of New York City to the celebrity culture of Los Angeles and then to Europe for a quixotic late phase of experimental photography and filmmaking-Weegee lived a life just as worthy of documentation as the scenes he captured. With Flash, we have an unprecedented and ultimately moving view of the man now regarded as an innovator and a pioneer, an artist as well as a newsman, whose photographs are among most powerful images of urban existence ever made.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2018 - AudioFile

The life and legend of artistic news photographer Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, is explored in this biography full of episodic anecdotes. Narrator Graham Halstead's conversational tone gives the impression he's flipping through an album of Weegee's life's work—from crime beat to Hollywood—revealing all the lurid details. He employs some accents and character voices to alert the listener to quotations; though it's hard to know their accuracy they do lend New York City ambiance to a story that spans the first 60 years of the twentieth century. While the text veers into a lot of detailed history on the development of photography and print media in New York City, the charismatic Weegee takes the listener on a thrill ride. S.T.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

With Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, Christopher Bonanos has finally supplied us with the biography Weegee deserves: sympathetic and comprehensive, a scrupulous account with just the right touch of irreverence. Bonanos…takes the photographer seriously without letting him and his self-mythologizing off the hook…Bonanos covers it all, including Weegee's more self-consciously "arty" work…The art criticism on offer…is like the best of Weegee's street photography: revealing and unpretentious…Flash gives us Weegee in full, offering a measure of protection against the oblivion he feared the most.

From the Publisher

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BEST BIOGRAPHY OF 2018

*A New York Times and Library Journal Best Art Book of 2018, a Newsday and Town & Country Best Book of 2018, and a Star Tribune and Globe and Mail Best Holiday Gift Book*

“Christopher Bonanos has finally supplied us with the biography Weegee deserves: sympathetic and comprehensive, a scrupulous account with just the right touch of irreverence. Bonanos…takes the photographer seriously without letting him and his self-mythologizing off the hook.” —The New York Times

"[A]n outstanding biography...Bonanos is a peerless guide to Weegee’s career, writing with obvious relish and great insight." —Newsday

“A snappily written life of Weegee the Famous…[a] fine biography”—The Wall Street Journal

"Weegee and his world don’t encourage minimalism, and, fifty years after his death, he has at last acquired a biographer who can keep up with him." —Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker

"Continually fascinating…deeply researched…compelling."—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review*

“An analysis of the news photographer’s times, photos, and techniques as well as of his publicity-hungry persona, this it the biography the pseudonymous Arthur Fellig – self-anointed ‘official photographer for Murder Inc.’ – deserves.” —The Globe and Mail

"The cut and strut of Bonanos’ vivid prose captures the rough-and-tumble of mid-twentieth-century New York, while vital details gleaned from his extensive research enliven the portrait...he makes the man behind the camera fully human." —Booklist, *Starred Review*

“[A] superb biography…Bonanos has meticulously researched every aspect of Weegee’s life, filling this fascinating and lively account with amusing and touching anecdotes.” —Library Journal, *Starred Review*

“[An] impeccably researched biography…Bonanos offers a lively history of the early years of news photography, rich with anecdotes that create Weegee's persona." —PopMatters.com

“Christopher Bonanos’ superb biography reveals how the man born as Usher Fellig in 1899 reinvented himself as a chronicler of the seedier sides of nocturnal Manhattan in the 1930s." —The Seattle Times

“[A] gritty, exhilarating portrait” —BoweryBoysHistory.com

"Vivacious … long-overdue and endlessly entertaining." —The Santa Fe New Mexican

“[A]n energetic and informative biography…Bonanos’s revelatory portrait of 'Weegee the Famous' will interest general readers, as well as those with a special interest in photojournalism.” —Publishers Weekly

“Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig was perhaps the perfect vehicle for defining and delivering the fear and wonder of the modern city to our American spirit. Journalist, artist, and huckster, Weegee stole shards of a New York through a camera lens, then reassembled the great city in a mosaic that somehow—despite a fair degree of fraud—still defines urbanity itself for us. We know the photographs, and now, with this biography from Christopher Bonanos, we can finally know something of the legendary, improbable, and much-caricatured man."—David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire and The Deuce

"Flash is a crackling portrait of a man and his era—as immediate and as alive as Weegee's pictures themselves. Chris Bonanos vivifies not only his subject, but the long lost New York that he lived in, and that made him."—Daniel Okrent, New York Times bestselling author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

“Weegee, in addition to being one of the greatest photographers ever, was a cartoon character and something of a living myth. This has confused perception for the better part of eighty years. Christopher Bonanos's nuanced and sympathetic account succeeds in merging those three aspects—not only was a lot of the bluster for real, but even the pure baloney was hard-won and contextually grounded. His is a sweet and melancholy book and a doorway into a mostly misremembered past.”

—Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

“There’s something about a car crash that makes people slow down as they pass by. The same is true of Weegee’s photos. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked to have known him, but it would’ve been interesting to have met him. And this fascinating biography by Christopher Bonanos brings to life the gritty old New York City where he lived and worked. He was a legendary character whose work inspired young hopefuls like myself."—Cindy Sherman, artist

JULY 2018 - AudioFile

The life and legend of artistic news photographer Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, is explored in this biography full of episodic anecdotes. Narrator Graham Halstead's conversational tone gives the impression he's flipping through an album of Weegee's life's work—from crime beat to Hollywood—revealing all the lurid details. He employs some accents and character voices to alert the listener to quotations; though it's hard to know their accuracy they do lend New York City ambiance to a story that spans the first 60 years of the twentieth century. While the text veers into a lot of detailed history on the development of photography and print media in New York City, the charismatic Weegee takes the listener on a thrill ride. S.T.C. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-04-16
A fine-grained close-up of the lensman who lit up New York City, both low-life and high-.If there was ever a caricature of the old-time newspaper photographer, it is Weegee, born Usher—later Americanized to Arthur—Fellig (1899-1968). A stocky Gotham type down to the rumpled suit and ever present 5-cent stogie, he was the man on the scene with the Speed Graphic and the flaming bulb, throwing harsh noirish light on fires, wrecks, and any number of mob hits. Unlike most caricatures, his work has survived. His pictures of dead gangsters, necking teenagers in movie theaters, kids sleeping on fire escapes, a slovenly woman sneering at fashionable operagoers, distraught victims of a tenement fire, or an impossibly crowded Coney Island are indelible images of American life both before and after World War II. In this continually fascinating biography, New York magazine city editor Bonanos (Instant: The Story of Polaroid, 2012, etc.) presents Weegee as a skilled craftsman who learned that you had to "get punch in your pictures" to beat the competition; that meant angle, framing, and environment. A corpse on the sidewalk was just a fact; getting a city mailbox in the foreground—urging "Mail Early for Delivery Before Christmas"—created a story. Voyeurism was both Weegee's motivation and subject; he found as much drama in a sudden reaction shot—as in his picture of schoolchildren who have just witnessed a murder—as the event itself. The author makes a strong case for Weegee's continued relevance: "Things that seemed slight when they were made do not always turn out that way in the long run when thinking people who sweat the details are the ones making them. Weegee was one of those people, and he did just that."In this deeply researched (though lightly worn) and compelling portrait, Bonanos captures all sides of an artist in spite of himself.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169198041
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos