471. THE ORIGINAL CSI PHOTOGRAPHER: WEEGEE AND NEW YORK’S GRITTY UNDERWORLD

Willie Hiatt

Born Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), the photographer known as Weegee was fascinated by what scholars call the “spectacle” of gritty New York City streets in the 1930s and 1940s. Weegee trained a voyeuristic eye and a white-hot flash on murders, corpses, muggers, transvestites, and other marginalized underworld figures. Serving the insatiable demands of the printed popular press, Weegee’s work blurred the lines among photojournalism, CSI investigation, and fine art photography all in his lifetime. As an introduction to Weegee’s street photography, this talk explores the circulation of his work as art and commodity in today’s digital visual culture. 

10:00 – 12 noon                                                                                                                               1 Session

Tuesday, July 1                                                                                                                                  Fee:  $30

A B O U T  T H E  L E C T U R E R

Willie Hiatt, a Kentucky native, is an Associate Professor of History at Long Island University, Post Campus, and a former Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University (2019-20). He’s the author of The Rarified Air of the Modern: Airplanes and Technological Modernity in the Andes (Oxford, 2016). His current research is an oral history project examining how Maoist insurgents in Peru targeted high-tension towers during the Shining Path movement (1980-92).