Weegee in Berlin – Photographs from the Berinson Collection

C|O Berlin is presenting “Weegee‘s story” in the Postfuhramt Berlin.

[photo International Center of Photography Midtown

Exhibition
WEEGEEs STORY
Photographs from the Berinson Collection
24.02. to 06.05.07
Postfuhramt

Guided tour 15.04.07 . 3 pm

Weegee’s photographs have an immediate, almost violent impact: they are uncompromising, unprettified. His subjects are criminals, the homeless, accident victims and the assassinated, people on the edges of existence – but also include lovers, people on daytrips and people attending jazz clubs, variety shows and cinemas. The pictures are unique historic documents of everyday life and of the chaos and catastrophes in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s.

Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, was born in 1899 in Zloczow near Lemberg, Galicia (present-day Zolochiv, Ukraine) and died in New York in 1968. He is the prototype of the modern photojournalist and one of the most important photographers in the 20th century. From 1935 onwards, he worked as a freelance police reporter, adopting the ironic moniker Weegee the Famous. In the mid-1940s, he gave up photoreporting and turned to advertising photography for a variety of magazines such as Life, Look and Vogue, and became a photo caricaturist and a producer of short films.

Gallery-owner and collector Hendrik A. Berinson has compiled over a 20-year period the single most important and most extensive collection of Weegees work. C/O Berlin presents the first comprehensive showing of Weegee’s work in Berlin, including more than 220 black-and-white exclusively vintage prints and of videos by and about Weegee.

C|O Berlin website

[photos] Side Photographic Gallery