Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is
Speaker 1: gonna not be related exactly to what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: But Tracy, have you watched the documentary series Light and Magic? Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. UM if you are a film dork and
Speaker 1: you you love particularly VFX. Uh, it is about the
Speaker 1: beginnings of industrial light and magic and how all of
Speaker 1: those people really did, in their very very disorganized and
Speaker 1: wonderful creative ways, UM, change the film industry. But that
Speaker 1: is not at all what we're talking about today. We
Speaker 1: bring this up because in one of his interviews, Richard Edlund,
Speaker 1: who is one of the great uh forerunners of visual
Speaker 1: effect X, at least in the modern era, mentioned himself
Speaker 1: as a kid running around with a camera and he
Speaker 1: I don't remember the exact quote, but he says, you know,
Speaker 1: like looking like I was Wegi, and I was like,
Speaker 1: oh I forgot I had Wegi on my list. Uh. Weigi,
Speaker 1: if that name is not familiar to you, is a
Speaker 1: fairly famous photographer. UM. He's often cited as having been
Speaker 1: a really strong influence on the work of artists like
Speaker 1: Dan Arbis and Andy Warhol, but on the on a
Speaker 1: bigger scale because he's pretty unique in that a lot
Speaker 1: of people saw his work without knowing who he was,
Speaker 1: and he was also getting attention from the art world. Uh.
Speaker 1: He influenced the entire world really in how New York
Speaker 1: City was viewed by people, both people who lived in
Speaker 1: the city and people outside of it, because he really
Speaker 1: showed the city through his lens in a way that
Speaker 1: was very unvarnished and raw, in stark black and white.
Speaker 1: So that is who we are talking about today. So
Speaker 1: he's known as we G today. He was born Usher
Speaker 1: Felic in Zulichev, which at the time was in Austria
Speaker 1: Hungary now it's in Ukraine. That was on June twelf
Speaker 1: and when he was seven, his father, Bernard left for
Speaker 1: the United States, so Usher and his mother and his
Speaker 1: three siblings stayed behind. They were there for the next
Speaker 1: four years while Bernard was working on all kinds of jobs,
Speaker 1: just trying to get settled enough that he could send
Speaker 1: for the rest of the family and have them join
Speaker 1: him in the US. At one point early on, he
Speaker 1: sent his wife some stage money as a joke. She
Speaker 1: initially thought it was real. I'm a little just irritated
Speaker 1: by this story. Uh. She packed herself up at the
Speaker 1: children and got ready for a move, and the bank
Speaker 1: also initially thought this was real and exchanged this currency.
Speaker 1: They figured it out though, before the family left for
Speaker 1: the US and they had to cancel their move. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, uh, this is all based on of course,
Speaker 1: we's later recollections, and he's known for kind of embellishment
Speaker 1: and whatnot. But the way he describes the money, it
Speaker 1: had some pretty key indicators that it was fake, like
Speaker 1: a joker on the back and stuff, but like not
Speaker 1: legal tender and right, and it wasn't like from a game.
Speaker 1: It was like to be used in a play. It
Speaker 1: was stage money, but apparently good enough to fool a bank.
Speaker 1: But they did eventually make it in nineteen o six,
Speaker 1: when Usher was still ten, the family was finally reunited.
Speaker 1: At that point, Bernard had started a push cart of
Speaker 1: his own to make money because he had just struggled
Speaker 1: so much trying to get other people to give him
Speaker 1: an opportunity that actually paid a decent living wage. This
Speaker 1: was a lesson that I think you can see as
Speaker 1: we talk about Wei's life story, it clearly imprinted on
Speaker 1: his son, Usher, and in later years, Ogi wrote about
Speaker 1: coming to the United States and said that Ellis Island
Speaker 1: seemed quote the most beautiful place in the world, even
Speaker 1: as immigration officials inspected him and his family to make
Speaker 1: sure they weren't bringing disease into the country. But what
Speaker 1: really struck this ten year old boy was being given
Speaker 1: fresh fruit while he was there. He had never, he said,
Speaker 1: seen a banana or an orange before. And his name
Speaker 1: also changed at this point, at least on paper, to Arthur.
Speaker 1: He does not appear to have ever gone by that name,
Speaker 1: and his family certainly didn't use it, but in the
Speaker 1: United States and in biographies, she'll often see him listed
Speaker 1: as Arthur Felik. The family moved soon after that from
Speaker 1: Bernard's Lower East Side tenement apartment on Pitt Street to
Speaker 1: another at the corner of Cherry and Jackson that was
Speaker 1: right next to a public school, and his father had
Speaker 1: negotiated for the family to live there for free because
Speaker 1: he and his wife were going to do all the
Speaker 1: buildings janitorial work. They still struggled financially, they were still
Speaker 1: trying to learn English. They were often called out as oigners,
Speaker 1: but we do described his family as having a pretty
Speaker 1: happy time during this point in his life. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: he whether or not he is um glossing over it
Speaker 1: or making it sound better than it was because he
Speaker 1: talks about going hungry sometimes. He still talks about like
Speaker 1: it was pretty carefree though for me, and I really
Speaker 1: liked my childhood. As he was learning English, Usher at
Speaker 1: the time became engrossed in the stories of Horatio Alger,
Speaker 1: who famously popularized the rags to riches story in popular novels.
Speaker 1: The young Fellig was convinced that he too could amass
Speaker 1: wealth if he just worked hard enough, just like the
Speaker 1: boys in the books. So he started his own paper
Speaker 1: route just pretty enterprising. But the problem was he could
Speaker 1: only get English language papers, and most of his neighbors
Speaker 1: were immigrants to They could not read English well enough
Speaker 1: to want to buy a daily paper, so that didn't
Speaker 1: pan out. Usher moved on to reading detective novels and
Speaker 1: transitioned his person no business to selling candy. He started
Speaker 1: out by purchasing the candy on credit. He somehow talked
Speaker 1: to a store manager into allowing him to do this,
Speaker 1: and then he took the candy cart around to the
Speaker 1: sweatshops in the neighborhood after school. He would sell things
Speaker 1: like chocolate and chewing gum to the women who were
Speaker 1: working in these sweatshops during their breaks. He reported making
Speaker 1: a hundred percent profit from this enterprise, and he gave
Speaker 1: all of his earnings to his parents to just keep
Speaker 1: the family fed and clothed. When Usher was fourteen, he
Speaker 1: quit school. He was a smart kid and he did
Speaker 1: pretty well, but he found it very boring compared to
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. He also was known to
Speaker 1: sleep in and he would kind of sleep until he
Speaker 1: heard the bell, and then, since he lived right next
Speaker 1: door to the school, he would just kind of run over,
Speaker 1: looking completely disheveled, and start his day. Although his principle
Speaker 1: really tried to get him to finish school because he
Speaker 1: was pretty smart, the family really needed more money than
Speaker 1: he was pulling in with his after school candy car,
Speaker 1: and he had already become fascinated with photography before he
Speaker 1: had left school. A street photographer had taken his picture
Speaker 1: with a tin type camera. Those were the cameras that
Speaker 1: captured images on sheets of metal that had a dark
Speaker 1: lacquer coating. This whole experience had really captivated him. He
Speaker 1: saved up enough money to order his own inexpensive tin
Speaker 1: type camera, so he did manage to get an eight
Speaker 1: am to six pm job with a photography studio after
Speaker 1: a few months of working with this tin type. He
Speaker 1: definitely saw this as a way to continue his education
Speaker 1: and learn from actual photographers. That studio specialized in taking
Speaker 1: photographs of large objects that door to door salesman would
Speaker 1: then use to make their pitches to potential buyers. It
Speaker 1: of course, was not realistic to carry things like furniture, chandeliers,
Speaker 1: and headstones around to make sales, and Ushered worked as
Speaker 1: an assistant, positioning the products and the lights as directed,
Speaker 1: and just trying to make everything look as good as
Speaker 1: possible for these photos. He also ran errands. He swept
Speaker 1: up after shoots. He did basically all of the jobs
Speaker 1: that the lowest man on the ladder would be assigned.
Speaker 1: The other area of specialty for this photography business was
Speaker 1: taking photos of burned out buildings for insurance filings. Usher
Speaker 1: was in charge at these shoots of blowing flash powder.
Speaker 1: He described blowing the powder through a tube onto alcohol
Speaker 1: soaked rags to ignite that powder and light up the photograph.
Speaker 1: It's probably informed his later work doing a lot of
Speaker 1: night photography. But for all of this work, some of
Speaker 1: it pretty dangerous. The flash powder not always very safe
Speaker 1: to be around. He made four fifty a week. So
Speaker 1: two years and his job, the camera operator left and
Speaker 1: Usher was promoted into that vacant position. When his boss
Speaker 1: refused to pay him even half of what the previous
Speaker 1: camera operator had made, Usher quit on the spot. This
Speaker 1: might sound rash for somebody who was helping to support
Speaker 1: his family, but Usher had a whole other income stream
Speaker 1: because he was still selling candy on the side, although
Speaker 1: his later work hours had led to him transitioning to
Speaker 1: selling this candy at burlesque clubs instead of it factories.
Speaker 1: And at this point Usher was eighteen, So he bought
Speaker 1: himself of you camera and he started his first career
Speaker 1: as a freelancer. And he was really really pretty smart.
Speaker 1: You'll see throughout his story he's pretty savvy about business. Uh.
Speaker 1: He he kind of made his own customer base, so
Speaker 1: he would take photographs of children on the weekends riding
Speaker 1: a pony that he rented. Basically, he would just get
Speaker 1: neighborhood kids and put him on this pony and take
Speaker 1: their picture, and then once he had developed the proofs,
Speaker 1: he would visit those kids parents, show them nose proofs,
Speaker 1: and then be like, don't you want to order some prints.
Speaker 1: He later wrote that he believed that there was not
Speaker 1: a single East Side home that didn't have one of
Speaker 1: his photos of a child on a pony sitting in it.
Speaker 1: But once boarding the pony outpaced his income, he had
Speaker 1: to give that enterprise up. This is the time of
Speaker 1: restlessness for Usher. He wanted to move out on his own.
Speaker 1: Although this was painful for his family, they were really
Speaker 1: close knit, it was upsetting to his mother. In particular,
Speaker 1: she caught him trying to leave with a suitcase and
Speaker 1: was so upset about it that he stayed. A few
Speaker 1: weeks later, he sneaked away when the rest of the
Speaker 1: family was asleep. This was a bold and kind of
Speaker 1: foolhardy move. He didn't have money or a job or
Speaker 1: a place to stay, so he was sleeping in parks
Speaker 1: and missions, but eventually started spending the night at Pennsylvania Station.
Speaker 1: He had a whole routine where every night he would
Speaker 1: check the pay phones for loose change, and then he
Speaker 1: would find a bench in the waiting room to sleep
Speaker 1: on until police came to move people out in the morning.
Speaker 1: We G wrote in his autobiography that he would tip
Speaker 1: the officers a dime to let him sleep a little long. Younger,
Speaker 1: he was finally able to find some work as a
Speaker 1: bus boy in an automatic restaurant. This was part time work.
Speaker 1: It was ten thirty am to two thirty pm, basically
Speaker 1: to cover the lunch hours, but it also included a
Speaker 1: light breakfast beforehand and then all the leftover unpurchased items
Speaker 1: when lunch was over, as well as being paid a
Speaker 1: dollar a day. This is a pretty good deal at
Speaker 1: the time. He spent twenty five cents a night to
Speaker 1: rent a room, and he spent the extra available time
Speaker 1: looking for more photography jobs. He claimed that he eventually
Speaker 1: got himself fired from the automatic job on purpose because
Speaker 1: he felt like as long as he stayed there he
Speaker 1: was doing well enough that he was not working as
Speaker 1: hard as he should to get a photography job. We
Speaker 1: don't really know if he got fired on purpose or
Speaker 1: if he got fired because he did something actually wrong,
Speaker 1: but he definitely lost the job. Uh And after that
Speaker 1: he took some day labor jobs, mostly in factories, until
Speaker 1: he found a job taking passport photos. He was really
Speaker 1: good at this passport job because he managed to sell
Speaker 1: people who only needed to photos for their travel documents
Speaker 1: entire baggages of portraits for twenty five dollars each. Having
Speaker 1: had multiple passport photos, I'm also impressed that they were
Speaker 1: photos anyone would want to half of themselves, right, I
Speaker 1: don't want more of those. His boss increased his salary
Speaker 1: from fifteen dollars a week to forty dollars, and he
Speaker 1: described this period in his life is living it up.
Speaker 1: He was a young man making great money, and he
Speaker 1: partied a lot. But after three years of the job
Speaker 1: at the Passport studio, twenty four year old Ushert took
Speaker 1: a fifty percent pay cut to start working at ACME
Speaker 1: News Pictures in and we will talk about Wegi's time
Speaker 1: at ACNE after we first pause for a sponsor break.
Speaker 1: We mentioned that we started at ACMEE New Pictures in
Speaker 1: and that was the year that ACMEE had started. It
Speaker 1: was a subsidiary of Scripps Howard and this was essentially
Speaker 1: set up to be an in house source of imagery
Speaker 1: for the scripts Howard News syndicate, including the New York
Speaker 1: Herald Tribune, and Usher was hired to work in the
Speaker 1: dark room, developing photos and making prints. He made it
Speaker 1: known that he wanted to be a photographer, but because
Speaker 1: he was unwilling to agree to the dress code of
Speaker 1: shirt and tie, he only got sent out on night jobs,
Speaker 1: kind of an emergency situations. This actually aligned pretty nicely though,
Speaker 1: with Usher's desires. He loved taking photos of New York's
Speaker 1: night happenings, and a lot of his work on those
Speaker 1: early assignments was taking pictures of fires. He was really
Speaker 1: glad to be shooting more dynamic moments instead of things
Speaker 1: like passport photos, and he recognized that working in the
Speaker 1: dark room had actually made him think about how his
Speaker 1: photos would develop, so he had a stronger eye for
Speaker 1: catching moments that if he had not been doing that job.
Speaker 1: He was working in the news photo business and a
Speaker 1: really unique time. He was seeing all of the events
Speaker 1: of the time as they developed under his hands. But
Speaker 1: he also saw the transition from flash powder to flash bulbs,
Speaker 1: and he saw the shifting roll of news photographer as
Speaker 1: subjects like presidents became important to capture. Keep in mind,
Speaker 1: it was only in the late nineteen teens that newspapers
Speaker 1: started running photographs with stories instead of illustrations, so it
Speaker 1: was really the start of the field of photojournalism. We
Speaker 1: do it later write that he and photography were growing
Speaker 1: up at the same time. He also saw during this
Speaker 1: work that speed was vital. Whichever outlets got their negatives
Speaker 1: to the telephone company's distribution offices first ensured that their
Speaker 1: credit was the one that the entire country would see.
Speaker 1: So while it act me, Usher came up with some
Speaker 1: fairly ingenious and slightly sneaky ways to get ahead of
Speaker 1: the competition. For example, he would ren an ambulance to
Speaker 1: go out on a job, then have it parked and
Speaker 1: waiting while the shots were being taken. And then when
Speaker 1: he finished photographing and he jumped back in the vehicle,
Speaker 1: the sirens were turned on and they could zip downtown
Speaker 1: while Usher developed the photos in the back of the ambulance.
Speaker 1: He knew if he got caught doing this, he was
Speaker 1: going to get in trouble, so he would change it
Speaker 1: up sometimes with things like taxis and trains and all
Speaker 1: was doing this mobile developing, which is pretty impressive. On
Speaker 1: one shoot, he said that he locked himself in an
Speaker 1: empty subway trains motorman's booth and developed the glass plate
Speaker 1: negative in there before he got to his stop. Also,
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to his bosses, Usher moved into the dark room
Speaker 1: at ACME. He kept the makings of a bed in
Speaker 1: his locker. He would pull them out at night after
Speaker 1: everybody left. He cooked out of cans on the engraver's stove,
Speaker 1: and he loved that he did not have any neighbors.
Speaker 1: After a lifetime of living in cramped rental spaces, he
Speaker 1: was actually pretty happy with this whole arrange. S mint
Speaker 1: he outed himself to his bosses. When the United Press
Speaker 1: ticker machine went off at four a m. On September
Speaker 1: three that was alerting news outlets to the crash of
Speaker 1: the Navy dirigible the USS Shenandoah, that crashed in Ohio.
Speaker 1: He decided the story was more important than his secret
Speaker 1: about living there in the dark room, so he called
Speaker 1: his bosses. So this ended his sleeping arrangements. But ACNE
Speaker 1: got photos from the crash site before anybody else, since
Speaker 1: all of the other news photographers got the message when
Speaker 1: they arrived at work in the morning, hours after Usher
Speaker 1: and his bosses had already ensured that a cameraman in
Speaker 1: Ohio could get the shot and then send it via
Speaker 1: train porter to New York. The other offshoot of having
Speaker 1: his squatting in the office suddenly out in the open
Speaker 1: was that his bosses actually realized he was pretty happy
Speaker 1: to take photography jobs at all hours. He was clearly
Speaker 1: a night owl, so when news broke outside of the
Speaker 1: usual nine to five workday, it just started to be
Speaker 1: Usher that they called instead of one of the regular
Speaker 1: staff photographers. He had an ear to the ground approach
Speaker 1: to getting shots of crime scenes, and he moved really
Speaker 1: fast to get to the sites and take the pictures.
Speaker 1: And that's been said as something that led to that
Speaker 1: widely known moniker of Weiji. It's a phonetic version of
Speaker 1: the commonly mispronounced word wijia, and cops started calling Usher
Speaker 1: that because it seemed like he was psychic. He would
Speaker 1: show up at crime scenes even before the police got
Speaker 1: there on occasion, but according to Weigi himself, it was
Speaker 1: actually given to him by young women around the office.
Speaker 1: Either way, this name stuck and he liked it and
Speaker 1: he started using it. And after twelve years at ACME,
Speaker 1: Weigi was starting to feel restless and like his day
Speaker 1: to day had actually grown kind of scale. He was
Speaker 1: ready to do more photography of the things he chose,
Speaker 1: rather than waiting and hoping for assignments while he was
Speaker 1: developing the work of other photographers. So in five if
Speaker 1: he gave two weeks notice and once again returned to
Speaker 1: his freelance instincts. Because of his ears with Acme, Weigi
Speaker 1: knew the police around Manhattan, so as a freelancer he
Speaker 1: started hanging out at police headquarters. They didn't have press credentials,
Speaker 1: but cops had seen so much of him that they
Speaker 1: assumed that he did. He would actually pull the teletype
Speaker 1: slips off of the machines and then hand them over
Speaker 1: to police reporters, and so when they'd catch a story,
Speaker 1: he would just finagle a ride along with them. He
Speaker 1: later wrote of this time quote, crime was my oyster,
Speaker 1: and I liked it my post graduate course in life
Speaker 1: and photography. He also, somehow during this time, had finagled
Speaker 1: getting the key to the dark room at the New
Speaker 1: York Post, so he would develop his prints there and
Speaker 1: then he would give that outlet first DIBs on the
Speaker 1: shots that he had, and then he would make the
Speaker 1: rounds at other papers to sell his photos. He also
Speaker 1: wrote about this time why he felt his work was
Speaker 1: taking off and why those often grizzly images of people
Speaker 1: who had been shot or were in car accidents or
Speaker 1: we're trying to escape tenement fires were so appealing to readers.
Speaker 1: He wrote, quote, it was during the depression and people
Speaker 1: could forget their own troubles by reading about others. And
Speaker 1: Weiji was smart about hustling. And instances where there were
Speaker 1: photos with two people, like a cop in the man
Speaker 1: he had just arrested, Weji would cut the photo in
Speaker 1: half and sell each half as a separate image that
Speaker 1: would double his income. He also knew some papers wanted
Speaker 1: not just crime photos but also things like cute animal shots,
Speaker 1: so he cut deals with all the local fire stations
Speaker 1: to call him if any of their dogs ever had
Speaker 1: any litters. He would stage cute pictures of the mother
Speaker 1: and babies. He was basically always working as many angles
Speaker 1: as he could to sell as many photos as he could,
Speaker 1: and surprisingly he sold a lot of them to tabloids
Speaker 1: whose readers Wegi described as needing quote their daily blood
Speaker 1: bath and sex potion to go with the wreck fist.
Speaker 1: And though he had left Acne because he had gotten
Speaker 1: bored there he still had a really good relationship with them.
Speaker 1: He left on good terms, and he specifically had a
Speaker 1: good relationship with the photo editor there. He later said
Speaker 1: that he always saved the best photographs for ACME and
Speaker 1: that he knew he would always make a sale there.
Speaker 1: He later lamented, though, that he had been so good
Speaker 1: at providing such a steady stream of crime scene photos,
Speaker 1: editors got choosy, readers were less and less enthralled. Just
Speaker 1: as his cash at was dwindling, he managed to get
Speaker 1: photos of a couple of teenagers, Gladys McKnight and her
Speaker 1: boyfriend who had committed a grizzly murder. Through his connections
Speaker 1: and a friends, he had been the only photographer allowed
Speaker 1: to meet and take photos of the couple. He sold
Speaker 1: these to every paper in town After that. His name
Speaker 1: on a photo byline had enough cloud that photo editors
Speaker 1: were no longer jaded with his crime scene shots. At
Speaker 1: some point he started stamp being his photo prints with
Speaker 1: the imprint by Weiji. The famous Life magazine even ran
Speaker 1: a story about Wigi and his work and his close
Speaker 1: ties to police headquarters. Yeah, those photographs are super duper
Speaker 1: weird um that he got of those teenagers Gladys and
Speaker 1: her boyfriend killed Gladys's mother in a very gruesome way.
Speaker 1: But the photos that he took of them looked like
Speaker 1: engagement photos. It's really creepy and weird. That's very creepy,
Speaker 1: it is, but it's why people all wanted to buy them. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that is how three years into his post Acme
Speaker 1: freelance career, Wegi, who had gotten famous at this point,
Speaker 1: got permission to install a police radio right in his
Speaker 1: own car. This meant that he was more or less
Speaker 1: guaranteed to always be the first photographer on site for
Speaker 1: any emergency murder, rescue, fire, or accident. He was able
Speaker 1: to get shots before crowds had even formed, adding to
Speaker 1: the intimacy of his lenses point of view. He turned
Speaker 1: his car, which was d H Chevy coupe, into a
Speaker 1: mobile photo studio. He carried camera equipment, protective gear, food,
Speaker 1: extra clothes, and even disguises in the trunk. In nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: he started working regularly with the magazine PM magazine. This
Speaker 1: was on a salary. That relationship lasted four and a
Speaker 1: half years, and during that time he got paid every
Speaker 1: week whether he brought in images or not. He was
Speaker 1: also given the freedom to make his own assignments. He
Speaker 1: worked with the Daily News, The Herald Tribune, the Sun,
Speaker 1: and as we mentioned the post, the decade of the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties was the apex of his career. In addition
Speaker 1: to those papers all pretty regularly purchasing photographs, The New
Speaker 1: York Photo League had also taken notice of Luigi's work,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen forty one, the organization staged an exhibit
Speaker 1: of that work. Two years later, his photos started to
Speaker 1: go on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that relationship with PM magazine only ended because the magazine
Speaker 1: went bankrupt, not because he had any falling out with him.
Speaker 1: He quite liked them. Not all of Wegi's photographs, we
Speaker 1: should say, were of crimes and the people involved in them.
Speaker 1: He also took photos, sometimes with very clear social commentary.
Speaker 1: One of his most famous photographs during this time was
Speaker 1: called The Critic, and it was taken in ninette. It
Speaker 1: features two society women in fancy dress with white fur capes,
Speaker 1: and they have these sort of benign, pleasant expressions, and
Speaker 1: they're walking by another woman who has dressed much more humbly.
Speaker 1: That third woman is in profile. She has a slumping posture,
Speaker 1: and she appears to be sneering at the other two
Speaker 1: women judgmentally. We're gonna talk about this image some more
Speaker 1: in a minute, but it was widely praised as a
Speaker 1: social commentary illustrating the values of the working class versus
Speaker 1: the wealthy. He also took more joyous photos. He took
Speaker 1: a photo in ninety one called Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island.
Speaker 1: This has literally thousands of people in it. They're all
Speaker 1: crowded onto the beach. From his vantage point above them,
Speaker 1: he yelled and got their attention, and when a lot
Speaker 1: of people turned to face him, weg snapped the picture.
Speaker 1: He also took pictures in places like movie theaters, using
Speaker 1: infrared film to capture the goings on of the crowd
Speaker 1: even in the dark. He took a lot of photographs
Speaker 1: at a place called Sammy's Bowery Follies, which was a
Speaker 1: club full of performers and clients held that one might
Speaker 1: describe as being from the fringes of society at the time.
Speaker 1: They were mixing with celebrities who dropped in for a
Speaker 1: show or a drink, and he captured the culture and
Speaker 1: music scene of Harlem and a number of gorgeous photographs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those are some of my favorite pictures from him because
Speaker 1: they're just they're always super beautiful. Um. There's one really,
Speaker 1: really great one where he took a photo of a
Speaker 1: family as they were leaving church on Easter Sunday, and
Speaker 1: when he stopped to talk to them, the man had said, oh,
Speaker 1: I actually sell close, and he was like, well, that's
Speaker 1: why you look so sharp, and can I take your picture?
Speaker 1: And it's this great picture. They're all smiling, they all
Speaker 1: look beautiful. But the great part is there's this kid
Speaker 1: who is part of the family and he's dressed super sharp,
Speaker 1: but he's kind of leaning around from behind what I
Speaker 1: presume as his dad, and he has this great smile
Speaker 1: on his face and it's just this like spectacular capture
Speaker 1: of a moment. We are going to talk about four
Speaker 1: a into the book world. After we first hear from
Speaker 1: the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class,
Speaker 1: Going published his first book, titled Naked City, and he
Speaker 1: actually had a pretty hard time finding a publisher. It
Speaker 1: would take his collection of raw, gritty photos. Most publishers
Speaker 1: also wanted more kitchy and predictable images of the city,
Speaker 1: which were the kinds of photos that Wigi simply did
Speaker 1: not take. He had murders and odd ball street characters
Speaker 1: and buildings on fire, and it was all in black
Speaker 1: and white. For example, one of the images was a
Speaker 1: group of kids and a woman, all with a very
Speaker 1: wide range of expressions on their faces. You would have
Speaker 1: no idea what they were experiencing if it did not
Speaker 1: have the title their First Murder. The caption that he
Speaker 1: had written for it read a woman relative cried, but
Speaker 1: neighborhood dead end kids enjoyed the show when a small
Speaker 1: time racketeer was shot and killed, and the image that
Speaker 1: he paired this with was a photograph of the murder
Speaker 1: victim on the ground. Finally, he wrote quote the miracle
Speaker 1: happened the book was published. He had his book party,
Speaker 1: not at a swank hotel, but it's Sammy's Naked City
Speaker 1: was a huge success, and it opened the door for
Speaker 1: him to work for a time at Vogue, and it
Speaker 1: also made it a lot easier for him to publish
Speaker 1: the second book, which was Weigi's People, and that came
Speaker 1: out in n Yeah it is. He doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: have had a bad relationship at Vogue, but that was
Speaker 1: not a good pairing. It doesn't seem like a great fit.
Speaker 1: Really no. He tells a story in his autobiography about
Speaker 1: how his editor was like, you have to buy a
Speaker 1: tuxedo because I keep finding out that you weren't let
Speaker 1: into events because you didn't look nice enough, and I
Speaker 1: actually need you to get into events to take pictures.
Speaker 1: Um it's he got like a secondhand tuxedo and you know,
Speaker 1: war it all the time because he couldn't afford another suit.
Speaker 1: He said. Uh. In ninety seven, Wigi moved to Hollywood
Speaker 1: and he stayed there for five years. During that time,
Speaker 1: he worked as an advisor on films he occasionally ended
Speaker 1: up appearing in bit parts. One of the most enduring
Speaker 1: legacies of this time there is the work he did
Speaker 1: creating promotional photographs from the set of Doctor Strange Love.
Speaker 1: If you are a movie buff and you have seen
Speaker 1: photographs of the pie fight ending of Doctor Strange Love,
Speaker 1: that has never been seen because Kubrick changed his mind
Speaker 1: and destroyed the negative. Those photos were shot by Weigi,
Speaker 1: and his pictures are the only proof that that abandoned
Speaker 1: ending ever existed. In nineteen fifty two, he returned to
Speaker 1: New York. He published a book of photographs from his
Speaker 1: time in California the following year that was called Naked Hollywood.
Speaker 1: The images in this book examined celebrity and the culture
Speaker 1: surrounding it, as well as ideas of beauty. One series
Speaker 1: of photos shows a young woman in a crowd, first
Speaker 1: smiling and then looking worried, and then in the third
Speaker 1: and fourth shots breaking down into tears. It's easy to
Speaker 1: think the photographer had managed to be there when she
Speaker 1: got terrible news, but the caption reads quote an American tragedy,
Speaker 1: no autograph. We G also started to play with images
Speaker 1: of beauty in ways that often made them look grotesque
Speaker 1: or absurd, and he called these elastic photos. On one
Speaker 1: of them, he manipulated a photograph of film star Virginia May,
Speaker 1: and he made her look really freakish by printing her
Speaker 1: in a distorted and mirrored way. He basically like cut
Speaker 1: her off about one third of the way into her
Speaker 1: image and then mirrored that so the middle was cut out,
Speaker 1: and then he had like this strange double image of her.
Speaker 1: It made her appear to have two faces and no arms. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's interesting, it's weird. He also took a close up
Speaker 1: photo of Marilyn Monroe, and he squashed sections of the image,
Speaker 1: so she, who everyone agreed with spectacularly beautiful, came to
Speaker 1: look almost like a monster or a fun house version
Speaker 1: of herself. But the absurdity of Hollywood was something that
Speaker 1: we G also played with by using himself as the
Speaker 1: subject of the pictures. In one image, he took a
Speaker 1: photo of several shelves full of wax heads of celebrities,
Speaker 1: and his own head is among them. He definitely always
Speaker 1: seemed to love being part of a spectacle, and a
Speaker 1: lot of biographers and historians have written pretty extensively about
Speaker 1: his exhibitionist side as juxtaposed with his observer photographer side.
Speaker 1: Back in New York, he continued to experiment with his
Speaker 1: elastic photography, but it just wasn't all that popular. Some
Speaker 1: of the photos from this period and his life are
Speaker 1: quite charming, though, One titled Boy meets Girl from Mars
Speaker 1: features a man and a woman in a passionate embrace,
Speaker 1: but both of them are wearing future stick clothes and helmets.
Speaker 1: Throughout the nineteen fifties, it sort of seemed like he
Speaker 1: was trying to find a new voice in his work.
Speaker 1: He went to Europe, he came back to the States,
Speaker 1: he took sexy photos of Betty Page on a New
Speaker 1: Jersey farm. He played with image manipulation, but he never
Speaker 1: found a second wave of iconic style like those earlier
Speaker 1: gritty New York images he had created. He also made
Speaker 1: a nudist film of himself strikes most people as a
Speaker 1: little odd. Yeah, it's the strange little plot, his strange
Speaker 1: little foray. He he dabbled in nudism, and that film is, uh,
Speaker 1: it's very it's like a very strange arthouse film. When
Speaker 1: Weigi wrote his autobiography in nineteen sixty one, he dedicated
Speaker 1: it to the tool that has made his career writing,
Speaker 1: quote to my modern Aladdin's lamp, my camera. And you
Speaker 1: get a sense of the man immediately from the opening
Speaker 1: paragraph of the book, which reads, quote, my typewriter is broken.
Speaker 1: I own no dictionary, and I ever claimed I could spell.
Speaker 1: And if Shakespeare, Balzac and Dostoyevski could do it the
Speaker 1: hard way in Longhand so can I. He continues on
Speaker 1: to say that he doesn't need a ghost writer, and
Speaker 1: he has no creative inhibitions, and that quote what may
Speaker 1: be abnormal to you is normal to me. If I
Speaker 1: had to live my life over again, I would do
Speaker 1: it all the same way, only more so. It's a
Speaker 1: very fun read, although there's a lot of talk about
Speaker 1: his womanizing and some pretty detailed discussion of the sex
Speaker 1: workers of New York at the time, which comes along
Speaker 1: with a significant amount of misogyny. He talks, for example,
Speaker 1: about Saturday being the day of the week that he
Speaker 1: went to various addresses that were shared among the men
Speaker 1: that he knew as being the addresses of sex workers.
Speaker 1: Has talk about this isn't violent or scary, but it's
Speaker 1: detached and too humanized, and most historians encouraged taking a
Speaker 1: lot of this autobiography with a grain of salt. He is,
Speaker 1: as promised, pretty uninhibited in telling his story. He doesn't
Speaker 1: make himself out as a hero or anything, but he
Speaker 1: is very confident to the edge of cockiness about his work,
Speaker 1: and he does tend to center himself in every possible way.
Speaker 1: He's open about scenes that got to him. For example,
Speaker 1: he describes getting two scenes where people jump to their
Speaker 1: deaths and driving right by rather than stopping to take
Speaker 1: the picture, choosing not to stop because he knew he
Speaker 1: couldn't handle it, and then going home for the night.
Speaker 1: He's also open about a scene where he photographed a
Speaker 1: woman and her adult daughter as they found out that
Speaker 1: two of her younger children had burned to death, and
Speaker 1: that he cried when he took the photo, writing quote,
Speaker 1: the image of two crying women was to haunt me
Speaker 1: for the rest of my life. I was raised in
Speaker 1: a tenement, and I just couldn't escape them. It didn't
Speaker 1: bother him to take pictures of murdered gangsters, but family
Speaker 1: tragedies really upset him. He also mentioned that after being
Speaker 1: really shaken by photographing so many car crashes of vehicles
Speaker 1: that had crashed onto the street under the West Side
Speaker 1: Highway after losing control, he launched his own campaign to
Speaker 1: photograph the lack of safety at that site and to
Speaker 1: sell those two newspapers to run as a story about
Speaker 1: the problem. This got the city to finally add reflective
Speaker 1: markers to the abutments in the road, and of this effort,
Speaker 1: he wrote, quote this work I consider my memorial. What
Speaker 1: he doesn't include in that autobiography is any mention of
Speaker 1: his wife, Wilma Wilcox, who he had married a number
Speaker 1: of years before writing it, whether she was chagrined to
Speaker 1: have been left out, we do not know. He also,
Speaker 1: in talking about the many many women with which he
Speaker 1: claimed to have been intimate, never mentions an earlier marriage
Speaker 1: that didn't last very long. He seems, of course, to
Speaker 1: have been uninhibited talking about himself only in some ways. Apparently.
Speaker 1: Wilma and Luigi had known each other since the nineteen
Speaker 1: forty She was a social worker and a Quaker, and
Speaker 1: we she had come to depend on her after he
Speaker 1: was diagnosed with diabetes in the late nineteen fifties. Weig
Speaker 1: died on December nine, sixty eight in New York City,
Speaker 1: and Wilma was kind of the steward of his photograph
Speaker 1: collection after that. Part of the unique appeal of Weiji,
Speaker 1: both when he was working and now is how much
Speaker 1: his photos made the viewer feel like they were part
Speaker 1: of the scene. The way his work is composed often
Speaker 1: makes you feel like you're standing right in the middle
Speaker 1: of the action as it's going on. During his career,
Speaker 1: this gave his images appeal for the press, it made
Speaker 1: every story more real for the readers, and then today
Speaker 1: it offers a unique documentary view of the New York
Speaker 1: that he lived and worked in. But there have always
Speaker 1: been questions about whether these were all caught in the moment,
Speaker 1: and there have been instances where he confessed that some
Speaker 1: of his shots were staged, at least partially. For example,
Speaker 1: his photo The Critic that we talked about earlier, which
Speaker 1: was so acclaimed as a commentary on class, was actually
Speaker 1: somewhat contrived. The woman in the photo looking at the
Speaker 1: two wealthy socialites with disdain was a heavy drinker who
Speaker 1: was known around the Bowery, and Weiji confessed in a
Speaker 1: book written several years after the photo was taken that
Speaker 1: he had had his assistant at the time, Louis Leota,
Speaker 1: by her drinks until she was very intoxicated, and then
Speaker 1: they essentially propped her up on the street outside the
Speaker 1: met as limousines were pulling up to drop off opera goers.
Speaker 1: She is probably not looking at them with any kind
Speaker 1: of scorn. She's just very, very drunk and trying to
Speaker 1: fix her eye on something. Even with those kinds of manipulations,
Speaker 1: Weigi is recognized as an exceptional figure in photographic art.
Speaker 1: He was famous and both popular publishing and art circles
Speaker 1: in his lifetime. He figured out a way to exist
Speaker 1: as an artist on his own terms. In part because
Speaker 1: he had basically gotten in on the ground floor of photojournalism,
Speaker 1: and he remains fascinating today. His crime scene photos are
Speaker 1: still jarring and evocative and intriguing, and his other work
Speaker 1: continues to be examined and interpreted as photography buffs and
Speaker 1: biographers try to kind of tease out where the balance
Speaker 1: was between Usher Felig and Luigi. I highly encourage looking
Speaker 1: at lots of his work because it's very interesting because
Speaker 1: said some of it is obviously graphic. Yeah, there's so
Speaker 1: much of it online and I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: the entire collection of his artwork, but if you just
Speaker 1: google Luigi, there's a whole website that's collected right there,
Speaker 1: that's in tons of tense. Uh, you have a library card.
Speaker 1: I almost guarantee your local library has a book with
Speaker 1: photographs by him. They are everywhere. Um. I am jumping
Speaker 1: tone so significantly to our listener mail today. This is
Speaker 1: from our listener Kate, who writes High Ladies. I'm a
Speaker 1: longtime listener who saves your podcast epis, so it's to
Speaker 1: binge listen on my many drives from Kansas to Minnesota
Speaker 1: and back again. This has been a major sanity saver
Speaker 1: as my dog, Twilight photos attached is not the most
Speaker 1: talkative travel companion. Twilight is cute. Yesterday, toward the end
Speaker 1: of my third round trip to Minnesota this summer, I
Speaker 1: reached the episode on Dr Lucy Hobbs Taylor. I was
Speaker 1: delightfully surprised to find that her life's journey took her
Speaker 1: to the exact place I was traveling to and have
Speaker 1: called home for four years, Lawrence, Kansas. I drove by
Speaker 1: her Vermont Street residence uh photos also attached on my
Speaker 1: way to work this morning. There's a lovely private orchard
Speaker 1: between her former home and would you believe it, a
Speaker 1: dental practice called the Dentists in Lawrence. There are many
Speaker 1: historical buildings in the city of Lawrence, including a few
Speaker 1: on the University of Kansas campus, but I didn't know
Speaker 1: until today that Dr Hobbs Taylor's house was one of them.
Speaker 1: Thank you for teaching me something new about my own community.
Speaker 1: In addition to all the other incredible things your podcast covers,
Speaker 1: history really is all around us. Um. That seems so
Speaker 1: fun to me to like discover that a major prominent
Speaker 1: person in history, who again we all need dental work
Speaker 1: at some point in time. Um, you know, helped shape
Speaker 1: a field that is so vital to everybody's health and
Speaker 1: well being. Uh so, I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much Kate for writing us this letter.
Speaker 1: I hope that you had a lot of fun exploring
Speaker 1: and discovering these places. I had read that there was
Speaker 1: an orchard near her house, and I have never gotten
Speaker 1: to see a good picture of it, so it was exciting. Um.
Speaker 1: If you would like to write to us, you can
Speaker 1: do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com.
Speaker 1: You can also find us on social media as missed
Speaker 1: in History, and if you have not subscribed yet, you
Speaker 1: can do that quick as a wink on the I
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Stop you Missed in History Class is a production of
Speaker 1: I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
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