Weegee knew what kind of photos the editors of the New York daily tabloids wanted, in-your-face gutsy black and whites to capture the reader's imagination over the breakfast table. He always delivered too. This reprint of his 1945 book captures the energy of the Big Apple and yet there are no shots of skyscrapers. Instead the (mostly) ordinary folk of the city are shown getting on with their lives and deaths.
Many of the photos are taken at night, a Weegee trademark. Inside buildings he used infrared film so he could shoot in near blackness and capture his subjects displaying emotions they would hide, had they known a camera was about. Out on the street he captured the latest human tragedy in stark close-up with a blinding flash of his Speed Graphic camera.
The contents of this book are an amazing selection of photos but I was very disappointed by the reproduction, so only three stars. As far as I can tell, the photos have been scanned from the 1945 book rather than from original prints. The paper is coarse which doesn't help the reproduction either. This looks not much better than a book of photocopies. Far better I think to go for Miles Barth's Weegee's World. Although it does not have every photo from 'Naked City', the 250 included are printed as duotones on glossy paper, I particularly like this book because it shows many photos as original un-cropped prints. For instance, in his famous photo, 'The Critic' the three bystanders to the left of the two socialites are usually cropped out but here you can see how great the original was. This book also has three excellent essays about Weegee and his influence on other photographers in the Forties.
Another choice might be Weegee's New York Photographs, 1935-1960 with 335 photos from 1935 to 1960 and like the Barth book it is large size and beautifully printed (the photos are duotones) on glossy paper and could possibly have all the photos in Naked City.
