Unidentified Photographer [Weegee among wax heads of celebrities and leaders], 1951, International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993, © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images
Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles is the first museum exhibition devoted to the work that the tabloid photographer known as Weegee produced in Southern California. In addition to roughly 200 photographs, many of which have never before been shown or reproduced, the exhibition encompasses Weegee’s related work as an author, filmmaker, photo-essayist, and genius self-promoter. MOCA editor Erica Wrightson sat down with MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch and Guest Curator Richard Meyer to discuss the evolution of this exhibition and it’s relevance to Los Angeles.
Jeffrey Deitch: Richard, when we first met after my arrival here, you gave me a copy of your Weegee book and I just loved it. I was so excited to meet somebody who shared my interest and understanding of Weegee as not just a crime photographer, but as a true artist who was way ahead of his time. I wanted to put together a photography exhibition that could be part of the Pacific Standard Time project. Among the people I asked for ideas was you, and you came up with a brilliant, simple proposal: Weegee’s Hollywood work, based on his book Naked Hollywood. You had heard that there was some sort of rumor that beyond the photographs in Naked Hollywood, a book long out of print, there existed a large archive of Weegee’s Los Angeles photographs.
Richard Meyer: Most of these photographs had never been shown.
JD: So we decided to investigate.
RM: The first person who actually went to investigate was Jeffrey. He saw the archives before I did.
JD: They are at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York. Weegee had a longtime girlfriend named Wilma Wilcox, who outlived him by twenty years or more. Toward the end of Wilma’s life, art dealers and collectors started getting more interested in Weegee, but they were primarily interested in his New York crime photography.
RM: Which is the work that people immediately associate with Weegee.
Weegee, City Hall, Los Angeles, Cal., ca. 1953-55, International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993, © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images
JD: Right. And there was a kind of misunderstanding that the Hollywood work was a failure and wasn’t really worth looking at. So, a majority of the Hollywood photography—Weegee’s personal prints, many with his own notations—ended up in this archive that Wilma Wilcox donated to the ICP at the end of her life. Richard introduced me by email to a young man who works in the ICP named Christopher George whose responsibility is the Weegee Archive.
RM: Half the magazines are from his personal collection—incredible, vibrant, vulgar, sexy images—but the ICP still hasn’t accessioned them. They should buy them from him. He’s so committed to Weegee. He follows every lead.
JD: This is a remarkable person. His job is to digitalize the archive, but he has become the leading expert on this work. So he loved that we were interested in this and he opened up the whole archive to us. I had an extraordinary visit. I went before Richard to see if it was really true that there were one thousand unseen Weegee images. A few hundred were actually published. There are 600 plus unseen images of Hollywood and Los Angeles.
RM: And one of the things that Jeffrey and I were especially interested in was Weegee’s variations. He worked a theme through distorted lenses and trick photographs and he was very interested in commercial signage of L.A. He was particularly interested in signs for colonics.
JD: It was a kind of fad kind of like today how you see yoga and pilates signs everywhere. There was some bizarre fad in the late 1940s and the early ‘50s for colonic treatments. And Weegee just thought it was so perversely funny.
RM: So when I was in the archives, there were all these different photographs of colonic signs, colonic ads in the L.A phone book. He had attached colonics to a sign for home cooked meals at a restaurant. And my initial impulse was, OK we’ll choose one. But Jeffrey said, no, they’re interesting as proto-conceptual art, as proto-pop art, and they’re interesting in series, to see how Weegee is thinking about and then intervening in the very language of advertising or the promotion of products and services.
JD: It’s something L.A. has that influences artists. There’s so much in Weegee that prefigures the work of Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. Ed is a lender to the show. He has three extraordinary Weegee photographs. Weegee prefigures Andy Warhol in just the most uncanny way. And Cindy Sherman very much, too, with Weegee staging photographs and placing himself in the photographs as a character. It’s fascinating for us to find out that Cindy Sherman owns Weegee’s work. She is also a lender to the show.
Erica Wrightson: What about the fact that his work came out of print journalism? Back then everyone was reading the newspaper. Print media was an integral part of his career. What If he hadn’t been a tabloid photographer?
JD: Weegee was very conscious of the role of media and the evolution of media. He wanted to move here to get involved in film.
RM: People say that Weegee came to L.A. to be an artist, but he really came here to be a star. He had his first exhibition in a commercial art gallery in Hollywood in 1949, and we are actually loosely constructing that show. He had sold the movie rights to this bestselling photo book Naked City, which includes all of these incredible photos that were originally made for the tabloids, and he imagined that this would be the beginning of the next chapter of his career. He was cast in some bit parts and did distorting effects for various movies, and he got back in touch with Stanley Kubrick—they had been photojournalists together—and later in the ‘60s he photographed on the set of Dr. Strangelove. What he calls his elastic lens—thick lenses, kaleidoscopes, prisms, and mirrors—is something that he specifically developed in L.A. It’s something he didn’t do before he was here. And he talked about it as a response to celebrity culture. One of the things that interests me about Weegee, and it’s something that prefigures what later happened with Warhol and pop artists and post modernists, is his fascination with celebrity but also with excessive, grotesque aspects of celebrity culture.
JD: It’s as if he could somehow look into the future and see what would happen with Lindsay Lohan and TMZ and this extreme extension of the celebrity.
RM: For example, he photographed Elizabeth Taylor in her prime, in 1951, and she looks incredible, but he photographed her lifting a forkful of food to her mouth. It’s not the moment in which a movie star, or anyone, would want to be photographed. He didn’t generally produce glamorous, seamless images of the stars—he wasn’t a paparazzo—he approached them from unexpected angles and in very candid contexts.
JD: He was interested in the structure of celebrity. He photographed movie premieres, but didn’t photograph the stars emerging. He photographed people standing on benches trying to peek in, or limo drivers waiting around for the stars to come out.
RM: Even when he did photograph the stars, he photographed them from behind. Weegee is showing you the apparatus of fame and I think he is really thinking about how celebrity is made—the dream factory, the industry, how it is fabricated on an industrial scale through photography and other media.
Weegee, Hollywood Premiere, ca. 1951, International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993, © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty ImagesM
JD: Our main interest here is not just that Weegee is a good photographer who takes memorable images. It’s that he had a fascinating, original mind, and interpreted what’s going on in contemporary society and predicted what’s going to go on in our society as these trends continue.
RM: One thing I’ve been thinking about more, as we get closer to the show opening and through research and conversations with other people, is why show Weegee in a museum of contemporary art? I think that so much of what has happened since Duchamp, at least, is this questioning—what are boundaries of the art, of the museum, of elite culture, and why should they have to stop at painting and sculpture, why should they have to stop at something that is considered aesthetically achieved? And I think that putting Weegee’s work into this contemporary art museum lets us look at, say Koons, Murakami, or Warhol, or the whole history of pop, postmodernism, and conceptual art, even in a way, feminist art—in terms of Weegee’s sometimes outrageous treatment and distortion of female bodies—in a different light. I think that Weegee may not have understood himself as an artist in his own moment, but his work has become incredibly relevant to how contemporary art has developed since. His strategies of self-invention, his multimedia interests, his willingness to challenge what the New York art world was saying, his love of the lowbrow culture—all of this prefigures pop art and postmodernism. He showed at MoMA and then he satirized MoMa. He was interested in all aspects of culture—or as he put it, in photographing “Presidents and bums, gangsters and society dames.” In this way, he was a kind of Warholian figure avant la lettre. He insisted that we look not only up to the elites, but also across and down at what’s going on right beneath your feet, whether in the streets, on Skid Row, or in a strip joint.
A reporter asked me “What’s going on with MOCA? They did Art in the Streets, which was work that was meant to be on the streets, not in a museum, and now they’re doing Weegee in Los Angeles, which is work that was not meant for the museum.” So I told him that, actually, I think it’s incredible to be opening it in the space of the museum to all types of creative practices. It can actually be seen in relation to more conventional or formally self-conscious or professionally self-identified avant-garde artists…. I don’t know what one would do in a museum of contemporary art where you could only show things that had already been canonized as art with a capital “A” seems to me it wouldn’t be really contemporary.
JD: Yes, here our audience is part of the process of the expansion of artistic consciousness.
RM: And artists now are expanding our vision so that we can appreciate Weegee in a much different way.
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