Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous

Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
By Christopher Bonanos
Henry Holt and Co., 2018
400 pages

In the middle of the 20th century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography. Christopher Bonanos’s book Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of his life from his childhood as an immigrant street kid on the Lower East Side to his years photographing murder scenes to his experiments with caricatures of celebrities. As Bonanos observes, Weegee “very early on grasped that the distinction between high culture and low culture was growing blurry.” Out of that insight he made a career and a body of work that tell us a lot about New York City, its journalism, and photography. Bonanos speaks with Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan borough historian, in this New Books Network/Gotham Center for New York City History podcast interview.