Weegee

An accessible, collectable book on Weegee. First immigration American, Weegee (1899-1968) is the archetypal tabloid photographer of the twentieth century. Preferring to photograph under the cover of night, he was known for his aggressive use of flash. Weegee's photographic eye was unstoppable: drawn to the grotesque, the illicit, the illegal, Weegee delivered both harrowing and poignant photographs of crime scenes and criminals to New York's tabloid-reading public in the 1930s and 1940s. Named after the Ouija board' for his uncanny ability to arrive at the scene of a crime before the police, Weegee recorded the dark side of New York's streets. No sordid crime seemed to escape his flash and no crime was too gruesome to capture on camera for the papers the next day. Weegee's understanding of people's simultaneous repulsion and attraction to vivid photographs of crimes of passion, murder, brutal accidents was well before his time. Even today, his photographs still have the power to shock, and the originality of the images has elevated them in importance far beyond the newspapers he worked for.

Kerry William Purcell is a writer, lecturer and freelance picture editor. A former archivist at The Photographers' Gallery in London, he has written widely on film and photography. His previous publications include Phaidon's Alexey Brodovitch (2002).