Weegee: Serial Photographer

Weegee was a street photographer for New York's popular press in the 1940s. He was infamous for adjusting the position of dead bodies at crime scenes to make his photographs more pleasing to the eye. Wauter Mannaert and Max de Radigues have succeeded beautifully in capturing the contrasts in Weegee's life in pictures: the eternal doubt over whether to choose his violin or his photography; the streets and neighbourhoods of New York that he loves but also wants to escape; his photographs, which are printed in the popular press but should be on the walls of galleries. Their approach turns the creator of the book Naked City into a man of flesh and blood and makes you identify with him, so his rather tragic fate hits all the harder. The style in which Mannaert has drawn Weegee's hectic life is a perfect fit. His distinctive black-and-white drawings create the impression that you're walking with Weegee through New York's iconic Lower East Side of eighty years ago.