HANNA CHU
Assistant A&E Editor
Two new exhibits opening at the J. Paul Getty Museum demonstrate that pictures may be worth more than a thousand words — especially when they document momentous events in world history.
The exhibits, which opened Wednesday, showcase news photography covering major historical events. The decades covered by these exhibits represent a time when print journalism was the leading source of news instead of television or the Internet.
“Scene of the Crime: Photos by Weegee” features more than 60 photographs that were published during the 1930s and 1940s.
Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee the Famous, was a crime photographer who got his name from the board game Ouija because of “his miraculous ability to materialize wherever news was happening,” said Judy Keller, associate curator of the Weegee exhibit.
“Before, After Accident” is one such example of his “psychic photography,” as he called it. In the piece, the first photo is of a homeless man getting up from the floor, alive and well. The next photo is of the same homeless man — dead after being hit by a car.
While Weegee took photographs at crime scenes, areas of police activity and fires, like many other photojournalists, what set him apart from his contemporaries is that he focused on capturing people’s reactions to the event.
Not only did Weegee take pictures of buildings that were on fire, but he documented the community affected by the fire.
“He was very interested in how human expression figured into all this,” Keller said.
The 1930s through the 1950s are often described as the golden age of photojournalism, and Weegee thrived as a photographer who took dramatic and somewhat sensational images. An important figure in New York working what was considered a viable but glamorous job, he “developed a colorful aura because he was so close to crime, and this helped other press photographers,” Keller said.
There are three rooms dedicated to Weegee’s photography in the museum. In addition to his news photographs, there are photos of social life, such as opening nights at the opera and couples kissing at Coney Island.
“Because the newspapers liked so much what he did with news events, they would let him go to Coney Island in the summer,” Keller said. “They would send him to the opera on opening evening, and he would write short articles that went with the pictures.”
Through some of these photos, Weegee revealed the darker side of high society.
“Pictures for the Press,” an exhibit also showing at the Getty, includes photographs that mark important events in history from the 1940s to the 1970s from well-known photographers such as Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, Barbara Gluck and Eddie Adams.
Many of the photos are actual prints originally published in The New York Times, such as the “Atomic Explosion,” a photo of the bombing of Nagasaki.
“The photos relates to a period in press photography when wire photo technology was in its heyday,” said Brett Abbott, assistant curator of the “Pictures of the Press” exhibit.
There are about 35 photographs included in the exhibit, and they are divided into four themes: World War II, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and images of President John F. Kennedy.
Many of these photographs documented social injustice around the world and “communicated the news visually, not just in words,” Abbott said.
“Siege of An Loc” by Barbara Gluck shows a Vietnamese woman in agony on the floor, a deliberate photo taken by Gluck to demonstrate the strife that the Vietnamese people suffered during the war.
For Americans, photos like this “brought the war home for people to see what was going on on the other side of the world,” Abbott said.
Gluck described her time photographing the war as a “life-altering” experience and said she wanted her photos to help the American people understand the war.
“It wasn’t about the soldiers,” Gluck said. “It was about the civilians.”
Images such as “Self Immolation of Thich Quang Duc,” which shows the protest suicide of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk at a busy intersection in Ho Chi Minh City were controversial. Some newspapers shied away from front-page coverage. Other newspapers opted to reproduce it as a smaller image, put it in on an inside page or not print it at all.
“Papers are hesitant to print something that’s bound to get people agitated, like New Orleans today or the Iraq war,” Abbott said.
These powerful and many times shocking photos helped shape American public opinion and stirred the hearts of the people decades ago.
“Scene of the Crime: Photos by Weegee” and “Pictures for the Press” will be on display through Jan. 22. For more information, visit www.getty.edu.
09-22-2005
