Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous - Hardcover

Bonanos, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1627793062 ISBN 13: 9781627793063

Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

<p><b>The first comprehensive biography of Weegee—photographer, “psychic,” ultimate New Yorker—from Christopher Bonanos, author of <i>Instant: The Story of Polaroid</i>.<br><br></b>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 <i>Flash</i>, 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.<br><br>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 <i>Flash</i>, 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.</p>

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<b>Christopher Bonanos</b> is city editor at <i>New York</i> magazine, where he covers arts and culture and urban affairs. He is the author of <i>Instant: The Story of Polaroid</i>. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.

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Flash

The Making of Weegee the Famous

By Christopher Bonanos

Henry Holt and Company

Copyright © 2018 Christopher Bonanos
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62779-306-3

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Epigraph, 
Introduction, 
PART I OUT OF THE DARK, 
PART II THE FAMOUS, 
Notes, 
Index, 
Also by Christopher Bonanos, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

In 1899, the town of Zolochev was not the worst place in the world in which to be a Jew. Today, it is a good-sized suburb about an hour's drive from the city of Lviv, in the western part of Ukraine. At the close of the nineteenth century, it was out on the unfashionable eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Lviv was called Lemberg. Galicia was the name of the province in which it lay, under the awkward dual control of Vienna and Budapest. It was a crossroads of cultures, and thus of languages. Most residents spoke Polish because much of Galicia had once been part of Poland, but there was German in the streets as well, and a little Ukrainian, and lots of Yiddish.

Whether for Jews or Gentiles, though, it was not a comfortable or easy place to live. Galicia was the poorest part of the empire, with frequent famines and epidemics. The industrialization that was improving life in much of the rest of Europe was not really being pursued here; that kind of investment was being made, and its profits spent, way to the west. (Although, within a few years, even Zolochev would have telephone and telegraph service.) From these eastern territories, most of what the government wanted was a steady flow of wheat and potatoes. Viennese pastry depended upon Galician flour.

The town had roughly ten thousand residents then, about half of them Jews. If this had been a Russian village, its Jewish residents would havebeen facing systematic disenfranchisement, attacks, and horrific deaths in the pogroms. In Galicia, by contrast, there was, if not exactly harmony, at least a manageable equilibrium. Quite a few Jews in Zolochev had reached the merchant class, and you could almost tell how successful they were by their language of choice: the more they'd established themselves, the likelier they were to have shed Yiddish for Polish, as they integrated themselves into the local power structure. The town had a Jewish mayor, and it was represented by Jews in the parliament in Vienna. The emperor, Franz Joseph I, had bestowed equal citizenship upon his Jewish subjects, declaring their civil rights "not contingent in the people's religion." In return, the emperor was well liked by the Galician Jewish population, members of which wrote appreciative prayers and songs about him that were printed in their prayer books. There were, roughly speaking, three classes of Jews in town: successful bourgeois business folk, who dressed like city people; the poor but observant, whose dress and religious observance were, in the words of one contemporary, "half-civilized"; and the Hasidim, in their black fur hats.

Berisch and Rivka Felig were somewhere on the lower rungs of the middle group. They lived in House 226, according to public records. By June 1899, they had been married for not quite three years, with a son named Elias, and their second child was on the way. Berisch was literate and had learned Hebrew. He yearned to become a rabbi, although he didn't or couldn't do what it took to become ordained. In his son's memoir, we are told that the family spoke German and Polish, but it is overwhelmingly likely (and records suggest, and the rest of the family agrees) that the household language was Yiddish.

Rivka was also educated, and was a little bit further up the social ladder than her husband because her father owned some property and had his own business, supplying food under contract to the Austrian army. (Berisch worked for his in-laws, in fact.) She came from the large and widespread Imber family. An older relative from Zolochev named Naftali Herz Imber was in the midst of becoming a prominent poet, which suggests that he was well-off enough to do more than grub out a living. One of his poems, half a century later, was set to music and became "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem.

Berisch and Rivka's second son was born on June 12, 1899. They named him Usher. That he would, on another continent, become more famous than his cousin (for making art with a camera, a field that barely existed in 1899 and absolutely did not exist in the worldview of a hungry family in Zolochev) was not foremost in his parents' minds.

When a third son, Feibish, arrived two years later, the pressure to keep the children fed became more intense, and a political shift that took lucrative contracts away from Jews undercut the family business. The local détente was beginning to break down, too: less than a generation later, in 1918, Lviv would be the site of a vicious three-day pogrom. Great numbers of Galicia's citizens were leaving, and even a not-very-ambitious father could see that a better future lay elsewhere. In the twenty years preceding the First World War, three million people emigrated. About a quarter of those went to America.

Berisch went first, alone, in August 1903. That arrangement was not uncommon. The idea was to get a job on the reputedly gold-paved streets of an American city and eventually send some of that treasure home so the family could reunite. Maybe Berisch was just ready to try his luck in a new place; maybe it was because Rivka had found out she was expecting a fourth child, and he simply couldn't support six people on the work he could get. He left on the Hamburg-America Line's steamship Pretoria, packed into steerage with twenty-two hundred other people (plus a couple of hundred up above, in first and second class). It was one of the company's newer, faster ships, and the crossing took the typical seven days.

At Ellis Island, he named a cousin, Abraham Zwerling (who listed his address in a tenement at 201 East Seventh Street), as his contact in the New World. (At least, Berisch claimed they were cousins; it was not uncommon for immigrants to concoct a kinship with someone already in America, in the belief that it would ease their admission. There were indeed Zwerlings among the Jews of Zolochev, so Berisch and Abraham were probably related somehow.) Berisch — he quickly became "Bernard," although one document says that he briefly tried on "Barnet" for size — listed his occupation as "laborer," which is telling; he may have been a learned man, but now he would do whatever it took to get by. When he disembarked, he pledged, in accordance with the law, that he had no criminal record, was not a polygamist, was not an anarchist. He had four dollars in his pocket.

Even the poorest American city dwellers today would find it almost impossible to imagine the density and intensity of the Lower East Side into which he arrived. In the preceding fifty years, the five boroughs constituting New York City (only recently consolidated into one entity, in 1898) had quintupled their population, to 3.5 million. Most of those new people were not American babies but immigrants flooding in from the Old World. First from Ireland and England, then from northern Europe, and subsequently from Italy and Greece and Russia and Austria-Hungary, came ships packed full of people like Berisch turned Bernard, sometimes a thousand per day. Industrial America absorbed them, to fill factory jobs and build skyscrapers and dig subway tunnels. Because New York was the country's biggest...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Henry Holt & Company Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1627793062
• ISBN 13: 9781627793063
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar