Weegee and Naked City [antikvár]

Introduction when arthur fellig's first photo-book,Nfl^d'if was published in June 1945, it enjoyed spectacular commercial success, going through six printings by December of that year alone. Initially sold at four dollars a copy,Nailed City quickly became the most profitable photo-book in the history of American photography. A paperback version is still in print. Although hundreds of photographers had been taking pictures of New York throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Naf{ed City emerged as the most widely known single-volume visual representation of the city. Sensation was the book's calling card. Fellig's images of crime scenes, tenement fires, and boisterous crowds contrasted sharply both with the cool, precise modernist photographs of New York skyscrapers by such famed photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, and Margaret Bourke-White and with the documentary pictures of the city's residents by the equally famed Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Morris En-gel, and Arthur Rothstein. Beginning in 1935, Fellig had labored nightly as a hustling street photographer who monitored the police radio, chased ambulances and paddy (or "pie") wagons, developed his negatives on the fly, and sold his prints in the wee hours of the morning to the newspapers, magazines, and photo agencies. By the early 1940s, Fellig had made a name for himself as a freelance photographer with an almost preternatural ability to arrive at crime scenes