Usher (Arthur) Fellig, known as Weegee, is the archetypal press photographer of the 20th century. The major part of his photographic repertoire comes from his time as a photojournalist for New York’s leading daily newspapers between 1935 and 1945. The frenetic decade was filled with sleepless nights, hours of waiting in darkened rooms and stakeouts in his car, always prepared to rush to unimaginable scenes of trauma. Weegee provided the press with deeply moving and often harrowing photographs of murders, arrests, fires, among other accidents that occurred each night.

Weegee was as masterful with photography as artists of the same period were with paint. He found himself at a crossroads, enriching what should have been simple documentation of events in the news with personal visual perspective, while at the same time imbuing the images a distinct artistic dimension. Weegee casts his eye over New York in a way that captures a tragic, almost violent euphoria of figures, movement, and events as they unfold before his lens. A true master of black and white, Weegee gives us, first and foremost, a previously unexplored view of the architectural beauty of New York and the phenomenal power of the city’s buildings.

Brought up in the Lower East Side in one of New York’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, Weegee witnessed extreme poverty alongside the higher classes brazenly flaunting their riches. Childhood, street life and sleep, which so strangely resembles death, became his most pertinent and favorite themes to capture photographically. Similar to the work of Dashiell Hammet, Weegee captured the theater of American crime. Weegee’s images of gangsters dead in the street, their eyes staring into space and the faces of murderers concealed by bandanas, would later serve as a reference for Hollywood’s film noir. Weegee was an advocate for the injustice suffered by the black community. He denounced the apartheid regime that had overtaken a number of US cities at the time, and in an effort to raise public awareness of racial injustice, Weegee photographed the alienation and individuality of black people with empathy and care.

Weegee’s photographs directly inspired Pop Art artists, who’s subject matter was often inspired by press and advertisements. Andy Warhol used photos of car accidents taken by Weegee in his “Orange Disaster” series, thereby underscoring a crucial connection between contemporary art and the merciless images of reality.

In 1945, Weegee published a book titled Naked City, an anthology of his extensive work. Because of the author’s immense talent, the book was hugely successful. Today Weegee is regarded as a major photographer on par with Alfred Stieglitz, Bill Brandt and Brassaï.

Hendrik Berinson has spent some twenty years putting together two hundred and twenty-eight of Weegee’s images. His collection brings together some of the artist’s most important photographs.