The term paparazzo and its plural form paparazzi were first used in English in a Time magazine article dated April 14th, 1961, entitled “Paparazzi on the Prowl.” The piece put the spotlight on a new type of photographer that was giving Rome’s elegant district around Via Veneto an unpleasant reputation.
Outside its clubs and bars gathered a small pack of bullyboy snappers on Vespa scooters, hoping to catch a camera shot of their “targets” (celebrities, diplomats, even royals) in compromising situations or encounters for which Italian newspapers and magazines paid astronomical sums of money.
Hollywood on the Tiber
Mussolini inaugurated Cinecittà, Italy’s largest motion-picture studio, in 1937. It was a Fascist ambition to develop a domestic film industry that suited their propaganda program. The site became the focus of the Italian movie industry until Allied bombing almost completely destroyed its facilities. It was then used as a prisoner-of-war camp.
By 1950, the studios had been rebuilt and for the next two decades Cinecittà set cinema trends through the wonderful work of Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini. Attracted by subsidies and low costs, American studios shot such films like Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra (1963) at the location. Cinecittà was nicknamed “Hollywood on the Tiber.”
During the late 1950s, Rome was overrun by American movie stars and film makers and their entourage. Their presence encouraged an invasive form of photo-journalism. When Fellini set out to present an image of Rome’s self-indulgent and seamy life in his 1960 film La dolce vita, he introduced one of those “streetwalkers of Roman journalism” as a character in the story-line and called him Paparazzo.
The name was apparently derived from a pejorative term for a mosquito which reminded the film maker in his own words of a “buzzing insect, hovering, darting, stinging.” The plural form of the term stuck and became associated with ruthless groups of photographers that traded in visual exposure and derision.
The term itself may be a late introduction to the jargon, but the practice of this hunt for sensationalist stories and impudent images had been a reality in the streets of New York since the 1930s. The word “Weegee-ism” would have been an appropriate term to describe the trend.
Photo League
Ascher Fellig was born into a Jewish family on June 12th, 1899 in Złoczów in Austrian Galicia (now part of Ukraine). The first decade of the twentieth century was particularly harsh for East European Jews; many fled the persecution and violent pogroms that made life unbearable. Bernard Fellig emigrated to New York in 1908, followed in 1909 by his wife and their four children.
Ascher’s name was misspelled Usher on the steerage passenger list of S.S. Kaiserin Auguste Victoria (Hamburg America Line) which, at the time of the family’s crossing, was the largest vessel in the world. Having entered the United States through Ellis Island, the family settled in Brooklyn where Usher anglicism his name to Arthur. He started work at an early age and took on numerous odd jobs, including working as a street photographer.
With the refinement of camera technology during the 1920s, photo-journalism quickly came to the fore. The use of improved ink and paper allowed for full-page image spreads. It gave rise to specialist photo magazines such as Life, Vu and Picture Post to satisfy the public’s demand for “direct” images of news stories.
Fellig would take full advantage of these opportunities and raise the status of photo-journalism to a new level. In 1924 he was hired as a darkroom technician by the newly-founded ACME Newspictures agency located at 220 East 42nd Street, Midtown Manhattan. It was here that he learned the tricks of the trade. He left the firm in 1935 to become a freelance news photographer.
In 1936, the Photo League was founded in New York, a cooperative of practitioners who were active in the emerging field of socially committed photo-journalism. For aspiring photographers of the 1930s and 1940s the League was an important training ground. Its members came to be identified as the New York School of Photography. They shared the conviction that the impact of an image trumped all other considerations. Immediacy was the key word. Rules of formal composition were flouted in order to enhance the nature of the message.
Nearly all of the New York School photographers were Jewish and the majority of them immigrants. It was an environment in which Fellig thrived.
Jewish Refugees
Photography was excluded from any formal art education for some considerable time. A developing discipline that combined skill with technology, it was not hindered by academic regulations or shackled by prejudices that limited the field of participants. Because photography was not a “respectable” profession, the career was open to newcomers. The camera offered a career to marginalized individuals – to women, immigrants and Jews.
In Orthodox Judaism there may be taboos against making completely solid images that could be regarded as icons to be worshiped (Exodus 34:17 states “do not make any idols”), but there are no specific restrictions against being photographed or handling a camera.
From the 1850s to the 1950s Jews were everywhere in photography, as practitioners, technicians, inventors and publishers of photographic magazines. Jews (including Jewish women) succeeded in this domain of activity because of its socio-economic character. Refugees from Eastern-Europe in particular played a crucial role in the history of Anglo-American photography.
Stefan Lorant (who was born István Reich in Budapest) made his career as a photo-journalist and newspaper editor in Berlin. Because of his Jewish background he fled Nazi Germany. Shortly after his arrival in England in April 1934 he founded the magazine Weekly Illustrated.
In 1938 he persuaded newspaper proprietor Edward Hulton to set up a photo-news journal named Picture Post. Edited by Stefan Lorant, the initiative proved a massive success. The magazine reached a circulation of 1.7 million within its first year. Failing to obtain British citizenship, Lorant moved to Massachusetts in July 1940 where he built a prominent career as a photographer.
Weegee the Famous
Struggling to make a living as a press photographer in his early career, Fellig soon became an itinerant presence in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He developed his signature style by following the emergency services and documenting their activity. Working at night, his subject matter was for the most part human misery and disaster. He captured gunned-down victims, gangster shoot-outs, drunken bust-ups, cross-dressing men under arrest, or the ruinous impact of a blazing apartment fire.
He built his reputation on an uncanny ability to show up at a crime scene before the police arrived. Arthur was so respected by the NYPD that – as an exception – he was allowed to fit a police radio in the front of his 1938 Chevrolet. Entering an emergency scene, he appeared like a silent film character with a cigar between his lips and a gleaming aluminum and steel camera flash around his neck.
During the 1930s Arthur adopted the name Weegee. Observers admired his apparent sixth sense for crime and had likened this anticipation to an Ouija board, the fortune-telling game that was all the rage at the time. Arthur embraced the ring of mystery to the comparison. Spelling the word phonetically and building his own myth of notoriety, he took Weegee (or even: “Weegee the Famous”) as his professional name.
The real source of the name was more mundane and rooted in the start of his career. Young Fellig worked as a “squeegee boy” in darkrooms, removing excess water from prints and placing them on a chrome-plated sheet which was then inserted into heated dryers. His skills were such that the nickname became a badge of honor, initially that of “Mr. Squeegee” and then shortened to Weegee.
His modus operandi reflected a society of intense mobility where nothing seemed fixed and all that counted was the immediate, the moment, the Now. Always with the impact of an image in mind and forsaking delicacy in favor of drama, Weegee shot from unconventional angles and vantage points in an attempt to match every image with an appropriate composition.
He wanted more than just to report. He imposed his own vision, typically one that incorporated his dark sense of humor (with a flavor of slapstick and Keystone). His pictures painted a portrait of the seedy underbelly of the Big Apple, like an inner-city comic strip printed in black and white. Humour – as he remembered from his own struggle as an immigrant – was a basic equipment in the urban struggle for survival.
New York’s picture desks became accustomed to Weegee’s use of slang. For him, a corpse was a “dry-diver” if the victim had jumped from a roof or window. If it was dredged up from the harbor, it was a “bottom-feeder.” Those who had died in a fire were referred to as “roasts.” Tragedy acquired its own tough vocabulary.
Naked City & Coney Island
Weegee’s 1945 photobook Naked City, the book that made him famous, marked a crossover success from tabloid sensationalism into hard cover. He was drawn to characters on the fringe of society. As a professional he chased after celebrities, but he showed an authentic compassion for proletarian New York and its mass of marginalized people and street kids. The underworld was the milieu he recognized and remembered from his youth. He was the paparazzo of the nameless. That sets him apart from later gangs of picture hunters.
His liking for the chaotic density of multitudes is evident in his love affair with Coney Island. For a few years starting about 1939, he made it an annual summer ‘pilgrimage’ to photograph the mass of beach goers. Here, he got what looks like the whole of New York’s populace to ‘sit’ for its portrait.
Weechee made a considerable contribution to Coney Island’s reputation as a permanent icon of the city searching for repose.
A self-taught photographer without formal training, Weegee did not claim any artistic credentials. The ambition of Alfred Stieglitz and followers to raise photography to the aesthetic standard of a fine art did not concern him in the least. He was out there in Manhattan’s nocturnal streets to chase the news and shoot pictures for the Herald-Tribune, the Daily News, and the Post, amongst other papers.
His gritty images captured the city’s pulsating rhythm, reinforcing its status of a metropolis that was in continuous flux and transformation – the City That Never Sleeps. In his ability to express the most telling and significant moments of the events he photographed, his presence represented the turbulent nature of twentieth-century New York.
It is precisely for that reason that his oeuvre was both successful in the mainstream media and respected by the fine-art community. New York’s Photo League held an exhibition of his photography in 1941; New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) began collecting his work in 1943 and included five of his shots in its exhibition Action Photography.
Weegee died in December 1968. Twelve years later, his partner Wilma Wilcox and some of her associates formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated to create an exclusive and substantial collection of photographic prints made from the original negatives.
In 1993, she donated the entire archive of 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives to New York’s prestigious International Centre of Photography (ICP). It helped cement Weegee’s reputation as an “uppercut” modernist photographer without artistic pretense or aesthetic frills.
Illustrations, from above: Walter Santesso (centre) as freelance photographer Paparazzo in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita (Cine Bazar); S.S. Kaiserin Auguste Victoria of the Hamburg America Line, built in Stettin and launched in August 1905; it was the world’s largest vessel until the introduction of the Lusitiana; Weegee in 1945; Ouija board game; Weegee’s rubber stamp for signing his pictures; Weegee’s 1939 picture of a fatal tenement fire which was included in his photo book Naked City; Weegee’s picture of two men arrested for cross dressing, c. 1939 (Getty Images); Weegee, In Top Hats – In Trouble, 1942 (Included in Naked City); and Weegee’s image of a blistering day on Coney Island, July 22, 1940.
Great piece!