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.

Images on the Move

“…In recent years, a number of scholars have worked to expand our view of photography with an eye to the way it is tied into infrastructural systems (Hill 2019;Gürsel 2016). In addition, more work has begun to show that well before wire photography, the medium was always bound up with transportation and communication (Leonardi and Natale 2018;Batchen 2006).…”

Direct[Message]: Exploring Access and Engagement With the Arts Through Digital Technology in COVID Times

“…Recent studies show that Canadians living with disability, seniors, and so-called “visible minority” (a Canadian government statistical category) populations have lower arts attendance/participation rates than other populations in Canada; these studies consider attendance at art galleries and festivals, heritage, music, theater, or comedy performances, and personally creating or performing art as forms of engagement (Hill, 2014, 2019). Notably, some organizations now experiment with digital technologies as means of providing older populations with access to art and creative activities designed to reduce barriers, such as geographical isolation, low energy levels due to ill-health, and/or physical/mobility/sensory barriers (Gardner et al, 2018; Hunt et al, 2019; Woolhous et al, 2015, 2016).…”