CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/27/2020

Beautiful and voyeuristic. Tosh Berman reviews 'Weegee's Naked City'

Featured image—captioned "Odds and Ends. 'A phone booth is a handy place to make a date'"—is reproduced from Weegee's Naked City, the hot, newly remastered facsimile launching virtually tonight at ICP. It is the subject of Tosh Berman's current video review in a new Youtube series for Artbook | D.A.P. "Weegee is by no means a subtle photographer, or a subtle artist," Berman says. "He's a person who is in your face with his images and that's why he's so powerful… This is not New York as an objective viewpoint; this is Weegee's view of New York City… sort of like a painter painting a portrait of himself… And that's what makes Weegee's Naked City such a unique and beautiful work, of sorts. I use the word 'beautiful' as a very loose term because there are a lot of images of dead bodies, people in fires, lovers in the middle of the night. It's very voyeuristic… The beauty of Weegee is that he had an understanding of his landscape. He knew these people, he understood who they were and what they represented."