SOLD. ‘Naked City’ Book by Weegee, Da Capo Press, 2002
Weegee: Naked City
By Weegee. Forward by William McCleery, Da Capo Press, 2002 Softcover, 265 pages, Black & White Illustrations/Photos on every page. This is a new, raw edition made from the original (by permission) in 2002 by Da Cap Press, Boston, USA.
Asking $30
Product details
- Paperback | 244 pages
- 154 x 229 x 19mm | 352g
- 01 Mar 2003
- HACHETTE BOOKS
- Da Capo Press Inc
- London, United States
For Naked City, his first collection, Weegee cruised the streets of 1940s New York in the wee hours in search of the sensational. Lewd, louche, licentious but always brimming with life (except when brimming with death), Weegee’s photographs have endured decades of modern art criticism and are again enjoying a much-deserved cult revival.
Founded in 1964 as a publisher of music books, Da Capo Press became a general trade publisher in the mid-1970s. It joined Perseus Books in 1999. Today it has a wide-ranging list of mostly nonfiction titles, both hardcover and paperback, focusing on history, music, the performing arts, sports, and popular culture.
Weegee was among the first to fully realize the camera’s unique power to capture split-second drama and exaggerated emotion. But his profound influence on other photographers, most famously on Diane Arbus, derives not only from his sensational subject matter and his use of the blinding, close-up flash, but also from his eagerness to photograph the city at all hours, at all levels: coffee shops at three in the morning, hot summer evenings in the tenements, debutante balls, parties in the street, lovers on park benches, the destitute and the lonely. No other photographer has better revealed the non-stop spectacle of life in New York City.Weegee’s first book, Naked City (1945), was a runaway success and made him a celebrity who suddenly had assignments from Life and Vogue. By the publication of his second book, Weegee’s People (1946), he had cut the wires to his police radio and had begun to photograph the furred and bejeweled grandes dames at the Metropolitan Opera as well as his beloved street people. Naked Hollywood (1953) and Weegee by Weegee (1961) feature portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khruschev, and Liberace — many of them viewed through the distorted lens of his Weegee-scope.Regarded as some of the most powerful images of twentieth-century photography, Weegee’s work now resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.