Weegee, Standing By

Abstract

Informed by an interesting recent infrastructuralist turn in media studies and by an expanding sense among historians and theorists of photography of what might properly delimit the photographer’s toolkit, this essay considers aspects of the photography of Weegee, as these can be observed to issue from that photographer’s deep professional embeddedness in specific media-infrastructural conditions of the place and time he most productively inhabited: New York City in the early 1940s. This essay prompts questions (and hazards some answers) concerning the stakes of Weegee’s press-photographic engagements with the material, electronic, and atmospheric infrastructures of wartime dairy delivery, underground transport, and, most urgently, policing, so to better understand the fit of his pictures to the world they so cleverly described.