WeeGee Stories

[Ed Richards]

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/winter-2007/weegee-stories

[Mark Sawyer]

"These intensely fascinating evocations of true-life characters made famous in Weegee’s tabloid photographs can be read at a glance or savored. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Olen Butler gives voice and dimension to the men and women Weegee captured in freeze frame. Now, in their own words, the characters reveal the most intimate details of their legendary lives."

I can't tell for sure, but I'm guessing the author is making up stories to go along with Weegee's images? His Pulitzer Prize was for fiction. The blurbs about this work are pretty unclear...

[Bob Salomon]

Having grown up in the NYC metropolitan area in the 40s and 50s and having a father who was a publisher we received home deiivery of all of the major NYC papers, daily and weekends. The Herald Tribune, The Journal American, the Daily Mirror, The Daily News, the NY Times. As well as the local papers, it was always exciting and obvious when a Weegee photograph was on page one on any paper. The Times did not go for prints like his but most of the others did. Then there was his standing reward for anyone who could figure out how some of his stranger shots were done. Don't think he ever had to pay.

[Tim Meisburger]

definitely fiction. thats not a mother, its a child. And that's not a rat, its a kitten.

WeeGee was the most influential photographer of the 20th century, and the fact this dabbler is making a buck off WeeGee's fame, like some sort of tabloid paparazzi, is disgusting. Or ironic...

[Mark Sampson]

Fiction? That would be ironic given that 'Weegee The Famous' wrote his autobiography, iirc. His own stories might well be better than this author's (who I admit I haven't read yet), even if they turned out to be true.