hotography, at its mid-nineteenth-century beginning, muscled in on painting one precinct at a time. Portraiture, of a solemn, straight-on sort, suggested itself immediately. Its hold-still composition, simple and traditional, met a mechanical necessity of the new art: early studio photographers, at the mercy of long-duration exposure, often steadied the backs of their subjects’ heads with clamps unseen by camera or viewer. Landscapes held still on their own if the wind didn’t blow, so Gustave Le Gray could become an automated Poussin, while Mathew Brady strained to click his way past Gilbert Stuart. History painting—crowded, violent, declamatory—had to postpone its photographic update until smaller cameras made picture-taking portable and fleet. But genre painting, with its casual assemblages of ordinary life, stood ready early on to be appropriated by the new medium.
In “Bystander” (Laurence King), a newly updated history of street photography, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz point out the genre’s early inclination toward “humble people as subjects.” Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard’s “Photographic Album for the Artist and the Amateur” (1851) and John Thomson’s “Street Life in London” (1877) put images of chimney sweeps and millers in front of well-off viewers who could regard them with curiosity and concern: “Unlettered, uncomplicated people were felt to preserve an otherwise lost capacity for sincerity for which modern artists and intellectuals yearned.” Early in the twentieth century, as photography’s documentary capacities turned reformist in the hands of Jacob Riis and Paul Strand, it was still, as Riis’s famous title showed, a matter of “the other half” being viewed by those perched far above.
Only when tabloid newspapers went into mass circulation after the First World War, Westerbeck and Meyerowitz argue, did those “humble people” become the audience as well as the subject matter. More than anyone else, it was Arthur Fellig, self-insistently known as Weegee the Famous, whose “photographs of the poor were made—at least, originally—for the poor themselves.” The New Yorkers Weegee photographed—especially those caught up in sudden calamities of crime and fire—obtained a kind of fame that lasted not fifteen minutes but more like fifteen hours, until the next morning’s edition swept away the previous afternoon’s.
“Shirtless Officers” (1941).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
For decades, Weegee has been collected as art, thus restoring some of the original other-half dynamic between viewer and image. Coffee-table books of his work abound: “Unknown Weegee” (2006), produced for an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, is the least hefty and best arranged; “Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935-1960” (1982) is the grittiest. These have recently been joined by “Extra! Weegee!” (Hirmer), which contains nearly four hundred photographs, alongside the original, often exuberant, captions affixed by Acme Newspictures, the agency through which Weegee sold them. But there has been no complete biography of the photographer. Now Christopher Bonanos’s “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” (Holt) has displaced a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, “Weegee by Weegee,” published in 1961.
Usher Fellig was born into a family of Galician Jews in 1899. He became Arthur sometime after arriving on the Lower East Side, ten years later. According to Bonanos, his “sense of family” was so “minimal” that he miscounted his own siblings in that memoir. The Felligs joined the tenement dwellers who would soon constitute much of Arthur’s subject matter.
His coup de foudre came, he later recalled, before he left school, in the seventh grade: “I had had my picture taken by a street tintype photographer, and had been fascinated by the result. I think I was what you might call a ‘natural-born’ photographer, with hypo—the chemicals used in the darkroom—in my blood.” He acquired a mail-order tintype-making kit, and later got himself hired, at fifteen, to take pictures for insurance companies and mail-order catalogues. He bought a pony on which to pose street urchins whose parents were willing to pay for images that made their offspring look like little grandees. (The pony, which he named Hypo, ate too much and was repossessed.) During the early nineteen-twenties, Fellig worked in the darkrooms of the Times and Acme Newspictures, sleeping in the Acme offices when he couldn’t make his rent. He kept the agency’s photographers ahead of the competition by learning to develop pictures on the subway, just after they’d been shot. By 1925, Acme was letting him take photographs, albeit uncredited, of his own.
Bonanos describes the Speed Graphic camera—even now, still part of the Daily News logo—as being “tough as anything, built mostly from machined aluminum and steel.” It was the only press credential Fellig needed at murders and fires, where, after leaving Acme, in 1934, he continued to show up with a manic freelancing zeal. A couple of years later, he was living in a room at 5 Centre Market Place, with no hot water but with a handful of books, among them “Live Alone and Like It” and “The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult.” He decorated the place with his own published photographs—“like taxidermied heads on a hunter’s wall,” as Bonanos puts it. He got to the nighttime action so fast that he developed (and encouraged) a reputation for being psychic. Bonanos shows that Weegee’s success had more to do with persistence than with telepathy; a bell connected the photographer’s room to the Fire Department’s alarms, and he got permission to install a police radio in his ’38 Chevrolet. However much Weegee wanted people to believe that his professional moniker came from being recognized as a human Ouija board, it in fact derived from his early drudgery as a squeegee boy—a dryer of just developed prints—in the Times’ darkroom.
Bonanos, the city editor of New York magazine, stacks up the “nine dailies” that chronicled the metropolis between the two World Wars. The Times was “prim about bloodshed, more interested in Berlin than in Bensonhurst,” and the Herald-Tribune wanted photographers to show up for assignments wearing ties. Neither employed Weegee regularly, and although the tabloids ran on visuals, his real bread and butter came from the afternoon broadsheets, especially the Post, then full-sized and liberal but just as “lousy at making money” as it is today. The World-Telegram was the first to give Weegee the individual credit lines he was soon commanding from everyone else. Bonanos resurrects the inky roar of this world with a fine, nervy lip: Weegee’s murder pictures broke through not because of their “binary quality of life and death” or their “technical felicity . . . with angles and shadow play” but mostly because their sprawled, bleeding, well-hatted and finely shod gangsters made them “more fun” than all the others.
“Their First Murder” (1941).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
Bonanos also proves himself resourceful, tracking down a rubbernecking seven-year-old whom Weegee photographed after a murder in 1939, as well as a toddler who appeared in a Coney Island crowd scene the following year. Readers will want to keep their Weegee collections on the coffee table; Bonanos describes more pictures than his publisher could reasonably reproduce, even in a book that occasionally becomes relentless and replete, like a contact sheet instead of a selected print. But Weegee and his world don’t encourage minimalism, and, fifty years after his death, he has at last acquired a biographer who can keep up with him.
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Weegee’s frantic pace was a matter of economic and temperamental need. No matter how fast he might be on his feet, the job required a lot of waiting around between catastrophes, and car-wreck pictures paid only two dollars and fifty cents apiece. “Naked City,” Weegee’s immortally titled first book of photographs, published in 1945, reproduces a Time Inc. check stub that records a thirty-five-dollar payment for “two murders.” Bonanos captured the variation and the intensity of it all in a “tally of unrest” from April, 1937. Over three days, New York provided Weegee with a felonious repast: a hammer murder, an arson fire, a truck accident, a brawl by followers of Harlem’s Father Divine, and the booking of a young female embezzler.
During the forties, the short-lived, liberal, and picture-laden PM, which Bonanos sizes up as an “inconsistent and often late-to-the story but pretty good newspaper,” put Weegee on retainer and made his pictures pop, bringing out their details and sharpening their lines through “an innovative process involving heated ink and chilled paper.” His first exhibition, in 1941, at the Photo League’s gallery, on East Twenty-first Street, garnered good reviews. Its title, “Murder Is My Business,” was a noirish bit of self-advertisement destined to be overtaken by events: thanks to rackets-busting and a male-draining World War, New York was headed for a prolonged plunge in the rate of local killings.
“Showgirl Backstage” (circa 1950).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
Weegee liked being known as “the official photographer for Murder Inc.,” but his gangland pictures lack the pity and fear—as well as concupiscence—that his camera extracted from people committing crimes of passion and sheer stupidity. In the summer of 1936, he made a splash with photographs of the teen-age Gladys MacKnight and her boyfriend after their arrest for the hatchet murder of Gladys’s disapproving mother. In one of the pictures, the adolescent couple look calm and a little sullen, as if they’d been grounded, not booked for capital murder. Weegee displays a discernible compassion toward the panicked chagrin of Robert Joyce, a Dodgers lover who shot and killed two Giants fans when he was loaded with eighteen beers; his face reaches us through Weegee’s lens as he’s sobering up, beside a policeman, his eyes wide with the realization of what he’s done. Weegee never got his wish to shoot a murder as it was happening, but his real gift was for photographing targets after they’d ripened into corpses. He “often remarked,” Bonanos notes, “that he took pains to make the dead look like they were just taking a little nap.”
Weegee’s pictures are full of actual sleepers—along with those coöperatively feigning slumber for the camera—in bars and doorways, atop benches and cardboard boxes, in limousines and toilet stalls, at Bowery missions or backstage. He became to shut-eye what Edward Weston was to peppers and Philippe Halsman would be to jumping. Even his photographs of mannequins, another frequent subject, seem to evince a fascination with, and perhaps a yearning for, rest. The dummies don’t so much appear inanimate as etherized, ready to rejoin the urban rat race once they’ve gotten forty winks.
The voyeur was also an exhibitionist. Weegee sometimes surrendered his camera so that he could inhabit a shot instead of creating it. That’s him next to an open trunk with a corpse, and there he is dressed as a clown, photographing from a ring of the circus. In 1937, Life commissioned him to do a photo-essay about a police station’s booking process. He turned it into a feature about a crime photographer: him. His grandiosity grew with the years, despite, or because of, his self-diagnosed “great inferiority complex.” He took credit for helping to make Fiorello LaGuardia famous (never mind that LaGuardia was already mayor), and wrote in his memoir that he and the gossip columnist Walter Winchell “had a lot of fun together, chasing stories in the night.” The index to Neal Gabler’s stout biography of Winchell yields no mention of Weegee.
“Life Saving” (1940).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
In his début show, at the Photo League, Weegee exhibited a supremely affecting picture of a mother and daughter weeping for two family members who are trapped inside a burning tenement, and titled it “Roast.” A few years later, for “Naked City,” the book of photographs that forever secured his reputation, Weegee renamed the image “I Cried When I Took This Picture.” Cynthia Young, a curator at the I.C.P., has written that the retitled photograph became “a new kind of self-portrait, making the photographer part of the subject of the picture,” though she points out that some of the Photo League’s left-leaning members had disliked the original label. Did Weegee really cry? Colin Westerbeck once commented, “No, Weegee, you didn’t. You took that picture instead of crying.” The truth about the retitling lies not somewhere in between but at both poles. The man who once said, “My idea was to make the camera human,” experienced emotion at the fire; then crafted a sick joke about it; then, later still, realized that the image would go over better with sobs than with smart-assedness. Take away the question of intention and the picture one is left with remains, indisputably, a moment cut from life with a tender shiv.
The secret of Weegee’s photography—and the M.O. of his coarse life—was an ability to operate as both the giver and the getter of attention. Weegee didn’t learn to drive until the mid-nineteen-thirties, and before getting his license he relied on a teen-age driver, who took him not only to breaking news but also to his favorite brothel, in the West Seventies. The madam there, named May, “had peepholes in the wall,” and she and Weegee would watch the boy chauffeur perform in the next room. Weegee excised this last detail from the manuscript of his memoir, but merely to save the driver from embarrassment. In the early forties, he carried his infrared camera into dark movie theatres to photograph couples who were necking, and then sold the credited images. He also took some remarkable pictures of people in drag under arrest. In these images, the voyeur in Weegee seems overwhelmed by a respectful solidarity with his subjects’ defiant display. In his memoir, he writes about getting “a telegram from a men’s magazine; they wanted pictures of abnormal fellows who liked to dress in women’s clothes. I would call that editor and tell him that what was abnormal to him was normal to me.”
“Unusual Crime” (circa 1940).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
Weegee liked to say that he was looking for “a girl with a healthy body and a sick mind.” The two most important women in his history were unlikely candidates for extended involvement. Throughout the early and mid-nineteen-forties, Wilma Wilcox, a South Dakotan studying for a master’s in social work at Columbia, provided Weegee with the non-clingy company he preferred; what Bonanos calls “her mix of social-worker patience and prairie sturdiness” allowed her to survive his “erratic affection.” In 1947, he married a woman named Margaret Atwood, a prosperous widow whom he had met at a book signing for “Weegee’s People,” a follow-up to “Naked City.” The marriage lasted a few years. Weegee pawned his wedding ring in lieu of getting a divorce.
The voyeur-exhibitionist dynamic reached its peak when Weegee was, in Bonanos’s phrase, “watching the watchers”—an interest that grew over time. His pictures of people observing crime, accident, and even happy spectacle extended what Westerbeck and Meyerowitz see as street photography’s long tradition of memorializing the crowd instead of the parade. In 2007, the New York State Supreme Court affirmed the street photographer’s right to take pictures of people in public, something that had never much worried Weegee. “Poor people are not fussy about privacy,” he declared. “They have other problems.”
Weegee made three of his greatest views of viewers between 1939 and 1941. The first of them shows people neatly arranged in the windows of a Prince Street apartment building, looking out into the night as cheerfully as if they’d just been revealed from behind the little paper flaps of an Advent calendar. Below them, in the doorway of a café, is what’s brought them to the windows: a corpse claimed by the Mob and a handful of well-dressed police detectives. “Balcony Seats at a Murder” ran in Life, portraying harmless, guilt-free excitement, a carnival inversion of what a generation later might have been recorded at Kitty Genovese’s murder.
In the summer of 1940, Weegee captured a cluster of beachgoers observing an effort to resuscitate a drowned swimmer. The focus of the picture is a pretty young woman, the person most preoccupied with the camera, the only one giving it a big smile. She doesn’t disgust the viewer; she pleases, with her longing to be noticed, and her delighted realization that she, at least, is breathing. She’s the life force, in all its wicked gaiety.
“Dr. Eliot, would you let the dog out?”
The following year, Weegee made the best of his gawker studies, a picture prompted by what Bonanos identifies as “a small-time murder at the corner of North Sixth and Roebling Streets,” in Williamsburg. In it, more than a dozen people, most of them children, exhibit everything from fright to squealing relish. “Extra! Weegee!” reveals that the Acme caption for this kinetic tableau was “Who Said People Are All Alike?,” which Weegee, with his taste for the body blow, changed to “Their First Murder.” The killing that’s taken place is merely the big bang; the faces, each a vivid record of the ripple effects of crime, become the real drama.
“I have no time for messages in my pictures. That’s for Wesern Uni on,” Weegee said, swiping Samuel Goldwyn’s line. But once in a while he made a photograph with clear political intent, such as the one of Joe McWilliams, a fascistic 1940 congressional candidate shown looking at, and like, a horse’s ass. There’s also the image of a black mother holding a small child behind the shattered glass of their front door, smashed by toughs who didn’t want them moving into Washington Heights. Most deliberately, Weegee made a series of car-wreck pictures at a spot on the Henry Hudson Parkway where the off-ramp badly needed some fencing; he was proud that their publication helped get a barrier installed.
In a foreword to “Naked City,” William McCleery, a PM editor, detected a crusading impulse in Weegee’s picture of poor children escaping a New York heat wave: “You don’t want those kids to go on sleeping on that fire escape forever, do you?” Bonanos, too, thinks this photograph was made and received with indignation, but the image has always been more picturesque than disturbing. (Weegee almost certainly posed the children and told them to keep their eyes shut.) Still, Weegee often exhibited an immigrant’s pride—Bonanos calls him a “proud Jew”—that can be seen as broadly political. One looks at the pictures he made in Chinatown and Little Italy toward the end of the war, full of American flags and patriotic embraces, and senses his appreciation of the eclectic energies at play in the city, along with a feeling that the old tenement world was ready to take a fine leap toward something better.
“As the World Series of 1943 Got Under Way” (1943).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
“Girl at the Circus” (circa nineteen-forties to nineteen-fifties).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
“They’re Looking Up at the Empire State” (1945).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
Even when not explicitly activist, Weegee’s stance remains compassionate. Down on the Bowery, Sammy’s—a self-conscious dive frequented by boozehounds, talentless belters, a dwarf mascot, and uptown slummers—was the place Weegee chose for his book parties, somewhere he could both gape and show off. The bar was itself a contrivance, a kind of nightly photo op, but the pictures Weegee took there manage to be both exploitative and humane.
How literally true, and how staged, was Weegee’s work? In “Bystander,” Westerbeck and Meyerowitz show that early street photographers tried “to bully or finagle their subjects into behaving naturally.” This fundamental tension between a composed pictorialism and a trouvé “snapshot aesthetic” persisted in photography decade after decade. Alfred Stieglitz, as if trying to negotiate a compromise, would sometimes frame a setup and wait for passersby to wander into it; Brassaï orchestrated his photographs; on occasion Ben Shahn included his wife as a “fake subject” among real ones.
Bonanos admits that Weegee would sometimes “give the truth some extra help,” and when it comes to what he calls “minor adjustments” the biographer doesn’t mount an especially high horse. Still, he doesn’t hide the whoppers that amount to fake views. On November 22, 1943, Weegee’s most egregious cheating produced his most famous picture, “The Critic”: a scraggly, impoverished woman looks scornfully at a pair of fur-clad, tiara-wearing ladies arriving at the opera. The ladies are actually behaving more naturally than the down-on-her-luck observer, a woman Weegee found at Sammy’s and plied with drink before taking her uptown to complete his scheme. When he republished his opera photographs a couple of years later, his printed commentary gave no hint of the deception.
“Fireman Rescues Torahs” (mid-nineteen-forties).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
There were plenty of occasions when circumstances arranged themselves without need of manipulation—ones Weegee recognized for their unlikely, organic beauty, and took pains to capture before they could disappear from his viewfinder. “Extra! Weegee!” reproduces his photograph of a church fire on West 122nd Street, where the water arcs made by several fire hoses appear to be flying buttresses, permanent parts of the structure they’ve just come to save. In a nighttime picture, a thin man near a lamppost looks like one of Giacometti’s elongated sculptures. A shot through the open doors of a paddy wagon reveals two men on opposite sides of the van’s spare tire, covering their faces with hats; the result is a comic mystery and a sort of Mickey Mouse silhouette, in which their hats look like ears.
This attraction to the bizarre suggests Weegee as a precursor to photographers like Diane Arbus. In “On Photography” (1977), Susan Sontag acknowledges that Arbus once referred to Weegee as “the photographer she felt closest to,” but she rejected any connection between the two beyond a shared urban sensibility:
The similarity between [Weegee’s] work and Arbus’ ends there. However eager she was to disavow standard elements of photographic sophistication such as composition, Arbus was not unsophisticated. And there is nothing journalistic about her motives for taking pictures. What may seem journalistic, even sensational, in Arbus’ photographs places them, rather, in the main tradition of Surrealist art.
And yet one can hardly discount or fail to notice the Surrealist essence of Weegee’s paddy-wagon picture. The mask-like fedora might as well be Magritte’s apple. Weegee knew Surrealism when he saw it, and the recognition came from an artistic instinct for provocative juxtaposition. A circus-audience picture from 1943 shows two deadpan, hatted women holding hatted monkey dolls in their laps—an image that points straight ahead to Arbus’s work.
“Couple at the Palace Theatre” (circa 1943).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
“I Cried When I Took This Picture” (1939).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
The publication of “Naked City,” in 1945, brought public praise from Langston Hughes and a congratulatory note from Alfred Stieglitz: “My laurel wreath I hand to thee.” If there were critics who remained skeptical of photography’s status as art, there were now plenty of them ready to usher this night-crawling creature of newsprint into the pantheon. (Several Weegees had been exhibited in two moma shows in 1943 and 1944.) Weegee did not grow rich, but he craved fame more than money, and he had enough of the former to appear in advertising endorsements for camera equipment.
By the time all this acclaim was upon him, Weegee had more or less finished doing his most interesting work. He did shoot a girl being launched out of a cannon, but he was not made for the space age, let alone the era of urban renewal. Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman, brought him to the magazine for a time, but not much came of that, and the bits of advertising and commercial photography that he undertook don’t engage us now any more than they did him at the time.
“Making a Drink” (circa nineteen-forties).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
It was a mistake for Weegee to enter the well-lit, corporate world. His power had always come from making night into day. With flashbulbs, and even their riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was able to own and preserve the instant when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a hundred and eighty degrees. For a split second, the immigrant scrapper could be God, or, at least, Lucifer. Actual daytime represented exile, a demotion.
The itch to remain Weegee the Famous took him to Hollywood. Mark Hellinger, the columnist turned producer, seeking a sexy name for a detective movie, had bought the rights to the title “Naked City,” and shot the film in New York. This was a little like Cecil B. DeMille’s office wanting Norma Desmond’s car instead of Norma Desmond, but the experience of being around the production impelled Weegee, in 1948, to shift coasts, where he wasted a few years chasing bit parts in films. The only significant work from this period was a series of nighttime promotional photographs taken across the country for a 1950 Universal movie, “The Sleeping City.”
“The Critic” (1943).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
Weegee was back in New York by the end of 1951, and spent much of the next decade making pointless forays into Europe, art-house films, and soft porn. He photographed the members of camera clubs ogling Bettie Page, the pinup queen, and sought connection with a younger artistic crowd in Greenwich Village. He once invited Judith Malina, the co-founder of the Living Theatre, home, then chased her around his apartment. She recalled Weegee for Bonanos shortly before her death: “He wanted to see the soul of the person. He wanted to see the essence of the person. And he certainly wanted to see the tits of the person.”
Throughout his last years, Weegee devoted a baffling amount of time to “distortions,” fun-house caricatures of celebrities like Salvador Dali and Marilyn Monroe. They’re interesting for a second or two, but the car wrecks he’d photographed years before—pulverized and accordioned vehicles—were more authentically, captivatingly warped. What he considered a late creative stretch was actually shrinkage; toward the end, he ceased making many distinctions between art and junk. To slow the drift, he tried old tricks, at one point even buying another pony—a replacement for the long-dead Hypo. An attempted return to nighttime news photography proved beyond his physical energies.
“Couple in Voodoo Trance” (circa 1956).Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty
Amid the tiresome braggadocio of Weegee’s memoir, one finds no mention of either Margaret Atwood or Wilma Wilcox, but the latter made a god-sent return to Weegee at the end of his life. Decades earlier, Wilcox had been shocked by his storage methods—“photographs not in files but tossed into a pork barrel.” In 1964, with money from her pension, she purchased a brownstone on West Forty-seventh Street, and allowed Weegee, and his œuvre, to move in.
He died from a brain tumor at Christmastime in 1968, and Wilcox, “the silent hero of Weegee’s story,” according to Bonanos, set about organizing the wild clutter of his superabundant, uneven work. She lived until 1993, perhaps with a premonition of the photographic age now upon us, an era in which that smiling girl on the beach has no need of a press photographer to get herself noticed; she comes to us through her Instagram feed, as a selfie from which the drowning man has probably been cropped. Defying one of Weegee’s dicta—“A picture is like a blintz. Eat it while it’s hot”—Wilcox succeeded in getting his messy life’s achievement into the International Center of Photography, which today holds it in “about five hundred big gray archival boxes kept cool and dry
Morris Engel (April 8, 1918 – March 5, 2005) was an American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for directing the 1953 film Little Fugitive in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin, and their friend, writer Raymond Abrashkin.
Engel completed two more features during the 1950s, Lovers and Lollipops (1956) and Weddings and Babies (1960).
Engel was a pioneer in the use of hand-held cameras and nonprofessional actors in his films, using cameras that he helped design, and his naturalistic films influenced future prominent independent and French New Wave filmmakers.[1]
Contents
1 Career
2 Legacy
3 Personal life
4 Filmography
5 Recent Exhibitions (Selection)
6 References
7 External links
Career
A lifelong New Yorker, Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn in 1918. After joining the Photo League in 1936, Engel had his first exhibition in 1939, at the New School for Social Research.[2] He worked briefly as a photographer for the Leftist newspaper PM[2] before joining the United States Navy as a combat photographer from 1941 to 1946 in World War II.[2] After the war, he returned to New York where he again was an active Photo League member, teaching workshop classes and serving as co-chair of a project group focusing on postwar labor issues.[3]
Richie Andrusco in Little Fugitive
In 1953, Engel, along with his girlfriend, fellow photographer Ruth Orkin, and his former colleague at PM, Raymond Abrashkin, made Little Fugitive for $30,000, shooting the film on location with hand-held 35mm camera. The film, one of the first successful American "independent films" earned them an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story and a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The film told the story of a seven-year-old boy, played by Richie Andrusco, who runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island. Andrusco never appeared in another film, and the other performers were mainly nonprofessionals. Though the film was a critical success,[4] Engel and Orkin, who had since married, had a hard time finding funding [4] for their next film, Lovers and Lollipops, which was completed in 1955. The film was about a widowed mother dating an old friend, and how her young daughter complicates their budding relationship.
A scene from Lovers and Lollipops
Like Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops was filmed with a hand-held 35 millimeter camera that did not allow simultaneous sound recording. The sound of both films was dubbed later. Lovers and Lollipops was followed two years later by the more adult-centered Weddings and Babies, a film about an aspiring photographer than is often seen as autobiographical. This was Engel's only film to have live sound recorded at the time of filming. Weddings and Babies was the first 35 mm fiction film made with a portable camera equipped for synchronized sound.[5]
In the 1960s, Engel directed a variety of television commercials.[6] He made a fourth film in the late 1960s[2] called I Need a Ride to California (83 minutes), which followed a group of hippies in Greenwich Village, but it was never released during his lifetime. [6]
Legacy
Engel and Orkin's work occupy a pivotal position in the independent and art film scene of the 1950s, and was influential on John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese and François Truffaut[1][4][7] and was frequently cited as an example by the influential film theorist Siegfried Kracauer.[8]
Writing in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, biographer Raymond Carney says that Cassavetes was familiar with the work of the New York-based independent filmmakers who preceded him, and was "particularly fond" of Engel's three films. Carney writes that "Commentators who regard him as the 'first independent' are only displaying their ignorance of the history of independent American film, which goes back to the early 1950s.[9]
Truffaut was inspired by Little Fugitive's spontaneous production style when he created The 400 Blows (1959), saying long afterwards: “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with [this] fine movie.”[10]
Personal life
Engel and Orkin remained married until Orkin's death in 1985. In the 1980s, Engel began taking panoramic photographs[6] and in the 1990s, Engel returned to filmmaking, this time working on video. He completed two works: A Little Bit Pregnant[6] in 1994 and Camillia[6] in 1998.
Engel died of cancer in 2005.
Filmography
The Little Fugitive (1953)
Lovers and Lollipops (1956)
Weddings and Babies (1960)
The Dog Lover (1964) (short)
I Need a Ride to California (1968) (released in 2019)
A Little Bit Pregnant (1994)
Morris Engel, the New York photographer and filmmaker whose 1953 film, "The Little Fugitive," established a model for independent moviemaking that influenced directors like John Cassavetes and François Truffaut, died Saturday at his home on Central Park West. He was 86.
The cause was cancer, said his son, Andy Engel.
"The Little Fugitive" tells the story of a 7-year-old Brooklyn boy, played by Richie Andrusco, who mistakenly believes he has killed his older brother and runs away to hide at Coney Island. The movie was made on a budget of $30,000 using a lightweight 35-millimeter camera that Mr. Engel had developed with a friend, Charlie Woodruff. The small, unobtrusive camera allowed Mr. Engel to film his tale with an intimacy and realism that seemed revolutionary in a time when the Hollywood dream factory was functioning at its fantastic height.
The simple, disarming film, with its street-level views of ordinary New Yorkers going about their lives, proved to have an international appeal. It won the Silver Lion at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, and its story, by Mr. Engel, his soon-to-be wife, Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley, a journalist who had been a colleague of Mr. Engel's at the newspaper PM, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1954.
The movie's success encouraged other young filmmakers to circumvent the Hollywood system and finance their own resolutely personal films. In 1957, the young actor John Cassavetes borrowed $40,000 to make "Shadows," a partly improvised drama whose success opened the door to other New York independent filmmakers.
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In 1959, the French film critic François Truffaut drew on Mr. Engel's childhood themes and production techniques to create "The 400 Blows," the film that introduced the French New Wave. "Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie, 'Little Fugitive,"' Mr. Truffaut later told Lillian Ross in an interview for The New Yorker.
Born in Brooklyn in 1918, Mr. Engel took courses as a teenager at the Photo League, a cooperative founded by a group of socially engaged photographers, where one his teachers was Berenice Abbott. He had his first show at the New School for Social Research in 1939, worked briefly for PM and then entered the Navy, where as a combat photographer he covered the Normandy landing. After the war, Mr. Engel became a busy photojournalist, working for a wide range of publications including McCall's and Collier's.
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With Ms. Orkin, herself a gifted photographer, Mr. Engel made two more independent features: "Lovers and Lollipops" (1956), about a small girl struggling with the idea of her widowed mother's remarriage, and "Weddings and Babies" (1958), an autobiographical study of a photographer whose artistic ambitions are thwarted by his fiancée's dreams of domesticity. Neither enjoyed the success of "The Little Fugitive."
Mr. Engel returned to his work as a commercial photographer and did not make another feature until "I Need a Ride to California" in 1968, a drama about East Village hippies that remains unreleased. Later in life, he worked on video documentaries, including "A Little Bit Pregnant" (1993) and "Camelia" (1998).
"He was a street photographer his whole life," said his daughter, Mary Engel. "Through the 90's, he shot wide, color panoramas of the streets that have never really been exhibited, and we are working on that." The writer-director Joanna Lipper recently shot a remake of "The Little Fugitive," which Ms. Engel co-produced.
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Besides his son and daughter, Mr. Engel is survived by two sisters, Pearl Russell and Helen Siemianowski, and a grandson. Ms. Orkin died in 1985.
Morris Engel was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 8, 1918. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School and joined the Photo League in 1936 where he met Aaron Siskind, Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand, who invited him to work on his film “Native Land.”
Engel became a staff photographer on the newspaper “PM” and joined the Navy in 1941. As a member of Combat Photo Unit 8 that landed on Normandy on D-Day, he received a citation from Captain Edward Steichen.
After his return to “PM” he worked for many national magazines including “Ladies Home Journal”, “McCall’s”, “Fortune”, “Colliers” and others.
His initial interest for motion pictures begun with Paul Strand reached a new level when he built a lightweight hand-held 35mm camera with Charles Woodruff. This camera was a major factor in the production of his first film, “Little Fugitive.” It served the dual purpose of creating extreme fluidity, and being able to work on a small budget, with a tiny crew. The film, which is about a 7-year-old boy who runs away to Coney Island, has received international acclaim. Francois Truffaut said “Our new wave would never have come into being if it hadn’t been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie “Little Fugitive.” It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and was selected by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1997.
Engel and Orkin married during the making of “Little Fugitive” in 1952, and made a second film together, “Lovers and Lollipops.” Engel made “Weddings and Babies” in 1958 that starred Viveca Lindfors, and “I Need a Ride to California” in 1968. He also completed two video features, “A Little Bit Pregnant” in 1994, and “Camellia” in 1998. He also returned to the streets of NYC, shooting color panoramas.
Chronology
1918 Born April 8 in New York City
1936 Joined the Photo League
1939 Solo exhibition, The New School; worked on Native Land with Paul Strand
1940 Staff photographer, PM newspaper
1941 U.S. Navy, Chief Photographer’s Mate, Combat Photo Unit #8, (4 years)
1945 Resumed work as staff photographer on PM
1947 Freelance work for magazines: Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Collier’s, Fortune, This Week, and others
1951 Made 35mm motion picture short, The Farm They Won
1952 Co-produced, co-directed, co-writer and photographed Little Fugitive, award-winning feature film
1952 Married Ruth Orkin
1955 Co-produced, co-directed, co-writer and photographed Lovers and Lollipops, award-winning feature film
1958 Produced, directed and photographed Weddings and Babies, award- winning feature film
1959 Son Andy Born
1960 Did CBS television story on Brasilia
1961 Corporate film for Chase Manhattan Bank
1961 Daughter Mary born, Directed television commercials, including award-winning Oreo commercial
1962 The Dog Lover, a film starring Jack Guilford
1968 I Need a Ride to California, 35mm feature film; “Peace Is,” short film
1994 Video feature A Little Bit Pregnant
1998 Video feature Camellia
2005 Dies March 5
Awards:
United States Navy Photographic Institute Citation for Exceptionally Meritorious Photography, Awarded Navy Day, October 27, 1945
For Outstanding Achievement While Serving As A U.S. Navy Combat Photographer and as a member of combat photo unit number eight. For an exceptionally fine series of still photographs of the invasions in Southern France and on the Normandy Beaches, where his indifference to danger and his keen awareness of what scenes were most vital in the action around him, resulted in a contribution of great value to the visual records of the war. His photograph showing enemy dead on the Normandy beach, taken on D-day and in the face of grave danger, is one of the great pictures of the war and reflects the highest credit upon Engel and the U.S. Navy photographic service.
Signed by Edward Steichen, Captain USNR/Director, Navy Photographic Institute
Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, Crystal Apple Award, 1988
Lifetime Achievement Award, Photographic Administrators, 1998
Pioneer of Independent Cinema Award, 2002
Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions:
1939 The New School for Social Research, Introduction by Paul Strand
1940 The Photo League, NYC
1944 U.S. Navy Exhibit at the Ilford Company, London England
1999 Photographs Do Not Bend, Dallas, TX
1999 Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC
2000 Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago, IL
Group Exhibitions:
1948 The Exact Instant, 100 Years of News, Photography, In and Out of Focus, 50 Photographs by 50 Photographers,
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
1978 Photographic Crossroads: The Photo League, International Center for Photography
1980 The Witkin Gallery: Anniversary Collector’s Show. New York, NY
1985 Roy Stryker: U.S.A., 1943-1950,International Center of Photography, NYC
1985 American Images 1945-1980, Barbican Art Gallery, London, England
1985 A Tribute to Lee D. Witkin, The Witkin Gallery, Inc., NYC
1986 Tides of Immigration, Romantic Visions andUrban Realities, Brooklyn College, NYC
1987-89 The Photo League, 1936-1951, organized bySUNY New Paltz, travelled to 10 colleges throughout New York
State
1999 On the Elbow, The Witkin Gallery, Inc., NYCThe Photo League, Gallery 292, NYC
1995 An American Century of Photography: From Dry-plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photography Collection, ICP, NYC
1997 Oh Boy! A Group Show of Photographs. Port Washington Public Library, Port Washington, NY
1998 The New York School of Photography, 1930s – 1960’s, Jan Kesner Gallery, LA, CA
1998 Take the A Train, Howard Greenberg Gallery
1998 Eight Million Stories: Twentieth-Century New York Life in Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library,
NYC
1999 Photo League, Fundacion Telefonica, Spain
2002 Classic Images; Photography of Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel. Sag Harbor, NY
2006 “Where Do We Go From Here?”: The Photo League and Its Legacy (1936-2006). New York Public Library, New York,
NY
2011 Modernist Photography, 1910-1950 at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston, MA
2011 Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco,
CA
2012 Museum of the City of New York: London Street Photography, with “City Scenes: Highlights of New York Street
Photography.” New York, NY
2012 Film and Photo in New York: Morris Engel, Louis Fauer, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Paul Strand and Weegee. Art
Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL.
2012 The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League 1936-1951, Jewish Museum, NY, NY
2015 Coney Island – Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
2016 PM Exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, NY.
Collections
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ
George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, ME
Hallmark Photographic Collection, Kansas City, MO
International Center of Photography, New York, NY
LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
New York Public Library, New York, NY
Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL
Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO
San Antonio Museum Association, San Antonio, TX
Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS
University of Louisville Photographic Archives, Louisville, KY
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA