Madrid,
Fifteen years after his time at the Fundación Telefónica in 2009, Weegee, a black-and-white portraitist of New York at night who went to places where a murdered person lay, a criminal hid his face or a fire devoured a building, returns to Madrid with the help of the Fundación MAPFRE, in an exhibition, “Autopsy of the Spectacle”, organized in collaboration with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and curated by the director of the latter institution, Clément Chéroux.
Arthur H. Fellig, which was his real name, was born at the end of the 19th century, in Zolochov, in what is now Ukraine, but in the first half of the 20th century he became an emblem of American photojournalism and, to a certain extent, the architect of the image that was maintained inside and outside this country of a city that never slept, and least of all for him, who had the police frequency tuned in in his car; there, in New York, he died in 1968. His work documenting events is the one we know best, and the one that has been taken most often to museums after his death, but there is another Weegee, who also worked in the press but not so much in art centres, whose discovery is the greatest novelty of the MAPFRE presentation: the one who caricatured, laughed at Hollywood society and its vanities and openly manipulated images to the point of deformation. We could say that this author had a side close to Cartier-Bresson (the photojournalist) and another to Man Ray (the distorter) and that, in Chéroux’s thesis, both formed part of a career as diverse as it was coherent of a man who saw things in his own way and tested prejudices; his production, from the current point of view, can give rise to a good number of debates closely linked to the media: the convenience or not of showing victims of violence in the press; that of modifying images of tragic moments, with a certain sense of the stage, to adapt them to what the public expects or demands; or that of modifying, ultimately, a portrayed person based on the vision that the photographer maintains of him.
Both aspects of his work give off a rawness that he never intended to skimp on: he did not hesitate to take up the camera in front of the dead, prisoners, probable criminals, terrifying fires that sweep through humble homes… and neither did he hesitate to turn Kennedy or Marilyn into cat-alley fodder: his work is visual punches that, in addition to the scenes captured and Weegee’s ways of showing them, can invite the observer to reflect on the way in which we ourselves look; the occasional presence of spectators, onlookers or curious people, in some of the scenes seems to point in that direction, that of placing us before our own tics in front of the visual document. He did try, however, to ensure that the appearance of his camera did not modify the natural expressions of fright, sadness and, occasionally, nervous laughter of these people. voyeurs.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning the fact – as the commissioner did yesterday – that Fellig died a year after the publication of Guy Debord’s well-known essay The society of the spectaclein which this philosopher, promoter of the Situationist International, formulated a portrait of contemporary society in which people and communities have been replaced by their mere image and our experience of time, places, enjoyment and happiness has radically changed compared to the first half of the 20th century and previous stages of history; almost everything is now a commodity. Sudden death for one, sudden impact for the other.
Although in part of the photographer’s work his empathy is evident (especially in the images relating to the hardships suffered by an underprivileged population from which he came; it should be noted that he joined the protesting Photo League), the production for which we remember him today is linked to crime and accident and, in those cases, rather than tact we contemplate the aforementioned stagings, practically frames (there are those who say that his work is the visual equivalent of In cold blood (For his methods). For Weegee, there is not much distance between someone who reads or consumes a newspaper and someone who does the same with a movie, and he provides the former with material that the latter would expect.
Although he did intervene in these images, in a non-obvious but not too hidden way, in front of singers, actors, famous television presenters or politicians, he did not want to hide his tricks in the laboratory at all. But these variants are perhaps two sides of the same coin. According to Chéroux, During his first stage in New York, he showed that the tabloids sold the chronicle of events as a spectacle. From 1945 onwards he demonstrated that the media system made celebrities into a spectacular situation.. And he also looked with irony at those who blindly flattered them.
In that key year of 1945 he garnered much praise from critics and the public with his book Naked citya collection of his best photos, and a little later, in 1948, he decided to settle in Hollywood, where he was occasionally an actor and film consultant, but above all he photographed parties and caricatured stars. When he returned to New York in 1951, it was too late to return to his old approaches; in any case, he dedicated his last years to giving lectures, publishing more books and spreading his photocaricatures as much as he could, that is, to profiting from his own fame as the expert on crimes and arson that he never denied being.
“Weegee. Autopsy of the show”
MAPFRE FOUNDATION. RECOLETOS ROOM
Recoletos Walk, 23
Madrid
From September 19, 2024 to January 5, 2025
