FLASH! The Speed Graphic Camera

In a Hollywood dramatization of the life and work of press photographer Arthur Fellig—better known by the one-word moniker, Weegee—filmmaker Robert Zemeckis presents a view of New York City seen through what the film’s title calls a “Public Eye.” ¹ Actor Joe Pesci plays the notorious photographer, whose striking pictures of murder, squalor, and distress appeared in newspapers throughout the 1930s and 1940s. To show not only what, but how Weegee’s public eye saw (and saw differently from the average viewer), Zemeckis shifts the look and speed of his film from color to black and white and from normal speed to slow motion when looking at the New York cityscape and its inhabitants through the photographer’s apparatus and eyes. Although beautifully dreamy and evocatively nostalgic, this expressive turn contradicts the core of Weegee’s aesthetics and attitude. In stark contrast to Zemeckis’s presentation of a wandering and graceful vision, Weegee’s pictures are notable (and jarring) for the speed with which they were taken and the shock that they depict (figure 1). The power of Weegee’s eye—a combination of anatomy and apparatus—resulted from his ability to recognize and take (or better, tear) a picture from the rapid passage of life, not to slow down what is seen. Facilitating Weegee’s agile movements as well as his success in capturing immediate experience was the Speed Graphic, the camera preferred by press photographers of the 1930s and 1940s. While alacrity and acceleration characterize the process and account for the particular look of the Speed Graphic’s pictures, the subject matter of the camera’s photographs has long been associated with the violence and seaminess of the metropolitan streets where the apparatus was most often used.

Figure 1.

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The convergence of sordid violence and graphic starkness in the Speed Graphic’s pictures, coupled with the mechanical process’ instantaneity and immediacy, result in a style “keyed to the routine textures of urban life.” ² Characterized by “shock, raw sensation. . .violent contrasts and blunt ‘vulgar’ stylization,” this tabloid aesthetic has been called by critic J. Hoberman, “abstract sensationalism.” Hoberman explains, “At once cynical and sentimental, this mode fed on incongruity, mordant humor and the iconography of the street. The work of the tabloid school is brutal in both form and content, as assaulting as the cities which gave it sustenance and the subways where it was digested.” ³ While “abstract sensationalism” can be seen, according to Hoberman, in the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett, the B-movies of Samuel Fuller, and the cartoons of Chester Gould, ⁴ the most aggressive practitioner of this mode is the tabloid photographer and the apparatus most responsible for producing this style is the Speed Graphic camera.

Purchased for use by the Yale University Art Gallery in the 1960s, a 1940s-50s model of the Speed Graphic is now part of the assemblage of things “American” that welcomes the visitor to the museum’s wing devoted to arts of the United States. Along with John Trumbull’s palette, wood blocks for printing textiles, carpentry tools, and photographs of painters painting, the camera is meant to introduce viewers to American culture, to give context to the paintings, furniture, and decorative objects about to be seen. Mounted with its viewfinder against the wall, devoid of its flashbulb as well as its lens (which has been stolen so often that the Gallery has abandoned replacing it), the camera can actually tell viewers little of its place in twentieth-century culture or of the events to which it has been witness. My purpose here, therefore, is to replace the camera’s missing limbs, give it back its eye, and return with it to the streets in order to find its meaning as well as its sensational aesthetics, to see how this camera’s rapid and often violent vision has shaped our own.

Despite its eventual deployment in documenting the sordid side of urban life, the origin of the Speed Graphic lies in the far more pastoral bicycling craze of the...