ART REVIEW : WEEGEE’S CAMERA SEES EVERYTHING

There he is, the rascal, lying on the floor of a paddy wagon and bringing out all our basest instincts. With his camera poised to shoot whomever is loaded into the wagon, Weegee is ready to record the worst of the world--and to fill our appetite for it.

If no criminals or murder victims are available, Weegee is just as happy to peer down the blouse of a buxom woman or under her skirt. Lacking that opportunity, he’s off to a wild rent party in Greenwich Village or to his darkroom where he can make “distortions” of movie stars’ pictures, turning their glamorous personas into fun-house weirdos.

Weegee has photographed Hedda Hopper screaming, Louella Parsons with half of her face behind a post and Hedy Lamarr’s stockings at auction. He also has focused on the bare bottoms of a woman and an elephant.

He’s a clown, a lecher, a voyeur, a paparazzo-- in short, a dirty old photographer--but Weegee is so much else that the unsavory side of him finally doesn’t matter. No, that’s not right. It matters like crazy because his search for the earthiest, stickiest, least perfect aspect of humanity is finally just one element of the zest for life that spices his photographs.

You don’t have to struggle to arrive at this insight amid an exhibition of Weegee’s work at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery (through Sunday). His black-and-white pictures of children sleeping on a fire escape, sailors with their “girls” and youthful fans swooning over Frank Sinatra all reveal a strong fascination with innocence.

Even his photographs of corpses--lying on sidewalks or in streets where they were killed--are really about the way life goes on in the face of death. A woman and her daughter are extremely distraught over a fire in one picture, but it’s a mere moment of grief and they have each other. Along with their grimmer messages, Weegee’s photos of murder victims also tell you that the mail (in a postbox above one body) will be delivered for Christmas and that the policemen will go home to their wives and kids once the mess is cleaned up.

He shows you the casualties but more often he offers the survivors: the leg of a fat woman who stuffs her money in her stocking, the people who find intimacy amid crowds. Peter Martin, who organized the traveling show for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, may have stacked the deck in favor of a compassionate Weegee, but he didn’t excise all the wild cards. His selection of 79 pictures from 1932 to 1956 presents a humanely balanced view of a pushy photographer who became an artist in spite of himself.

Weegee (1899-1968) was born Usher Fellig, the son of Jewish refugees. In his catalogue essay, Martin calls him “a classic street urchin who left school at 14 to help support his family. Candy peddler, dishwasher, busboy, he was born middle-aged and proceeded to settle into his lifetime persona of the streetwise hustler who accidentally stumbled into a distinguished career.”

That career began with free-lance news photography, following on-the-job training as darkroom man for Acme News Service. Weegee would listen to police calls on the radio and race to the scene, often arriving before the officers. Unaware of his radio connections, New York City’s finest nicknamed him Ouija for his seemingly magical ability to sniff out trouble. Fellig spelled it Weegee and later billed himself as Weegee the Famous.

In one goofy picture in the exhibition, Weegee points a gun at his head and stands by a sign saying “Murder Is My Business.” His taste for the bizarre and the violent probably did make him famous, but it didn’t make him an artist. That came as he watched people respond to emotional situations and developed an eye for pathos and vulnerability.