Naked City

Naked City is the 1945 debut collection by the New York press photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899–1968), the book most responsible for establishing tabloid crime photography as a subject fit for museums.

Fellig worked nights out of a car fitted with a police-band radio, racing to murders, fires, arrests and accidents ahead of the daily papers. He set his own captions in the same clipped, wisecracking voice as his flashbulb pictures. The book widens beyond the crime beat to Coney Island crowds, tenement fire escapes in summer, Bowery drunks, opera-night socialites and Harlem nightlife. Loose thematic chapters mix high and low New York in a single sequence. The book's success led Universal to option the title for the 1948 film noir of the same name, with Fellig as a consultant, and it cemented his reputation beyond the tabloids he worked for.

Fellig emigrated as a child from what is now Ukraine to New York's Lower East Side. He earned the nickname Weegee for his knack of reaching a scene before the police, as if guided by a Ouija board. The Museum of Modern Art began acquiring his prints in 1943. He went on to publish Weegee's People (1946), Naked Hollywood (1953) and Weegee by Weegee (1961), then returned to New York to lecture on photography until his death in 1968.