Now Christopher Bonanos’s Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous has displaced a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, Weegee by Weegee, published in 1961. Bonanos resurrects the inky roar of this world with a fine, nervy lip ... Weegee and his world don't encourage minimalism, and, fifty years after his death, he has at last acquired a biographer who can keep up with him.
Christopher Bonanos has finally supplied us with the biography Weegee deserves: sympathetic and comprehensive, a scrupulous account with just the right touch of irreverence ... He had played the outsize role of Weegee the Famous so long he confessed he had a hard time knowing who he really was.
His biographer knows, though. Flash gives us Weegee in full, offering a measure of protection against the oblivion he feared the most.
Mr. Bonanos’s shoe-leather reporting is especially welcome since many of the stories Weegee told about his exploits were dubious, and some were contradictory ... My one criticism of Flash is that it doesn’t explore Weegee’s penchant for flouting the assumption that people are entitled to their privacy.
... Weegee receives a warm and sympathetic treatment in Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous, an outstanding biography by New York magazine staff editor Christopher Bonanos ... Flash is a superior work of biography, largely because Bonanos is clear-eyed about his subject’s less attractive traits — his lechery, misogyny and free-and-easy way with the truth — while conveying affection for the man’s brio and essential sweetness.
Christopher Bonanos’ superb biography ... reveals how the man born in an eastern European shtetl as Usher Fellig in 1899 reinvented himself as a chronicler of the seedier sides of nocturnal Manhattan in the 1930s. The book is a zesty read, steeped in the history of photography...while creating an indelible portrait of his subject.
Weegee, born Arthur Fellig, stood out...thanks to talent, hustle and a remarkable lack of a conventional social life. Perhaps that’s why Christopher Bonanos’s appropriately gritty biography, Flash, is subtitled the 'making' of Weegee, not the 'life' of him ... Bonanos is especially skilled at tracking how Weegee’s blood-in-the-gutter style became obsolete thanks to squeaky-clean postwar attitudes, politicized photojournalism that he largely rejected and newspapers’ flagging fortunes ... The masses didn’t always share Weegee’s brand of obsession with sex and violence. But for a brief, electrifying moment in American life, they were in perfect sync.
Because Weegee was inseparable from his work, this biography is mostly a photograph-by-photograph tour ... What comes through about Weegee is that he was ambitious, original, energetic, inventive, egalitarian (except when it came to women) and witty. Other than that, he’s a shell. Weegee’s life story is basically The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Scrupulously researched—no small feat with a serial fabulist like Weegee—and fluently written, Bonanos’s book is an unsentimental yet sympathetic account of a bizarre life and career, an American Dream contorted as if by one of the trick lenses Weegee loved to fool around with ... He did what many others did, but self-promoted to stardom ... Or, as Bonanos concludes, he was 'eaten alive by his own image.'
Bonanos has earned universal raves for ... the strength of not only his uncanny ability to get to the scene of a crime almost before it happened, but also on a genius for mirroring back to us our own seedy voyeurism.
The best comment on Weegee belongs to Judith Malina, of the Living Theater, who knew Weegee in Greenwich Village. She said [in Flash], 'He wanted to see the soul of the person. He wanted to see the essence of the person. And he certainly wanted to see the tits of the person' ... Self-deprecation was not part of his deal. Bonanos writes, 'Weegee was the one who went on talk shows, raced to burning tenement to beat the competition, got assignments that paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars; Arthur Fellig did not' ... I don’t know that I’m entirely persuaded by this separation of the 'real' man from his created persona. Surely they both ended up old, frail, and desperate, living in a depressing little room in Manhattan—although Bonanos does have a quotation from an interview in which Weegee speaks of himself as a Jekyll and Hyde character ... Until I read Flash I had no idea whatsoever that Weegee was involved with promoting the Zenit [camera] ... In fact, sales were good enough that the company took him to Moscow on a freebie. He seems to have enjoyed everything but the food.
In this continually fascinating biography, New York magazine city editor Bonanos presents Weegee as a skilled craftsman who learned that you had to “get punch in your pictures” to beat the competition; that meant angle, framing, and environment ... In this deeply researched (though lightly worn) and compelling portrait, Bonanos captures all sides of an artist in spite of himself.
New York magazine senior editor Bonanos constructs an energetic and informative biography of photographer Arthur Fellig ... Bonano’s revelatory portrait of “Weegee the Famous” will interest general readers, as well as those with a special interest in photojournalism.
