Gunman Doesn’t Want His Picture Taken – By John Perreault

For the first time since Bruno Richard Hauptman, police today permitted photographers in the line-up room at headquarters.

Gunman Doesn’t Want His Picture Taken

By John Perreault

 

 

 

 

For the first time since Bruno Richard Hauptman, police today permitted photographers in the line-up room at headquarters. The subject was Anthony Esposito, under indictment with his brother, William, for the murder of a business man and a policeman in Tuesday’s tragic Battle of Fifth Avenue. The detectives, manacled to Esposito, didn’t want their names or picture in the papers. They obliged by turning around, holding the gunman by head and arm so he couldn’t duck. The yardstick is in the line-up platform, where Esposito had stood, refusing to answer questions. "He looked like a sullen surly, snarling animal," Weegee reported. "He stumbled and sagged over to one side like a drunk."

PM, Story and Photo by Weegee (in Miles Barth, Weegee’s World, Bullfinch Press (Little, Brown), 1997.

What Photography Was

Two of Weegee’s most shocking photographs have one thing in common. Someone is smiling. Drowning Victim, c. 1940, one of Weegee’s many Coney Island photos, shows medics trying to revive the victim, most of the bare-chested crowd at a polite distance, hazy pier in the mid-distance parallel to the irregular line of the inquisitive but concerned faces.

But a young woman in a one-piece bathing suit (de rigueur for the time) kneels up-close, as if pressed to the left shoulder of one of the stethoscope-wearing men in white, and smiles radiantly, photographically at Weegee’s 4 x 5 Speed Graphic. She is not exactly one of the fiends of Abu Ghraib, but that smile in its own way is almost as evil.

More famous (i.e., more often reproduced) is Their First Murder, October 9, 1941. Weegee, out of sight, is crouched down to the right of the unseen corpse, his camera pointed upward to the faces of the turbulent crowd. Click. But why is the blond boy on the left smiling? Most likely because…he is thrilled to be photographed. Or as Joe Pesci’s Bernzie, based on Weegee, says in the 1993 The Public Eye, "Everybody likes their pictures took."

Even now. Because of our own experiences with digital imaging and what a little PhotoShop can do, we no longer believe in photography as truth. We compose ourselves for the camera. That’s not me you see, but my image of me.

Nevertheless, we believe in celebrity.

Or, as Weegee himself wrote in the introduction to his first book, Naked City: "People like to be photographed and will always ask ‘What paper are you from, mister, and what day will they appear.’ "

Even gangsters and murderers. Even transvestites emerging from paddy-wagons. Of course, slum kids asleep on hot-weather fire escapes, corpses, dead-drunk bums, and lovers or moviegoers (photographed with infrared light) have little to say about being caught by the camera.

Drowning Victim, Their First Murder and over 220 vintage Weegee photos can be seen at the elegant Ubu Gallery ( 416 E. 59th St., through July 23). Ubu, like C&S last week, provides an anti-Chelsea high. Converted garages with concrete floors are not the only way to look at art. Converted townhouses and duplexes still have a certain cache. On top of that, Ubu specializes in the real avant-garde — the Dadaists and the Fluxus types — and has one of the best websites of any commercial gallery.

Leave aside for the moment Cindy Sherman’s scary and wonderful clown self-portraits at Metro Pictures and Andreas Gursky’s tricky big photos of pseudo infinity at Matthew Marks, and wait awhile for John Coplans’ grizzly self-portrait nudes at Andrea Rosen. Weegee The Famous, as he liked to call himself, was the first postmodern photographer. In almost every picture, although invisible, both he and his camera are the stars. Trapped in photojournalism, he was able to explore deception, image manipulation, narrative, and, through captions and deep captions, was able to write himself into the picture. He also authored a wartime noir New York, peopled by waifs, corpses, lovers, bums and swells.