Death Porn

The International Center of Photography is exhibiting its Depression era Weegee collection again, surely the largest one-man aggregation anywhere of gabardine-clad dead guys with shiny shoes and blood running from their nostrils.

Why do I keep going back to look at this ugly stuff?

The text blocks on the wall suggest a number of high-minded reasons for appreciating Weegee's body of work, or vice versa if you prefer. He pioneered crime photography, documented a side of life few people witnessed for themselves, produced images in a style as direct and brutal as their subject matter. All true enough, I suppose, but not the real draw.

As a former newsroom manager, I do take my hat off to Weegee for being so accomplished in the skills that make for outstanding news photography, the ones that have nothing to do with working a camera. The key to making consistently great news photos is getting to the right place at the right time, which takes an unusual combination of instinct, guile, grit and luck.

Weegee lived in a squalid little room across the street from the police lockup where high profile perps were taken, and he monitored a police radio more or less full time so he sometimes reached murder scenes even before the cops arrived. Some of the photos in the exhibition show him posing with evidence, and the captions suggested he became such a fixture around the chalk outlines and bloodstains that he often helped officers look for clues.

Leaving the subject matter aside, nobody could deny the passion Weegee brought to his work. He seems not to have had an awful lot of competition for the kind of pictures he became known for, but he was driven nonetheless. I saw a lot of news photographers on the job in my working life, and the best of them were predators when it came to chasing the magic moment, though none I knew were as single-minded as Weegie.

But I don't think any of the above explains why Weegee's pictures still draw crowds. I think people come for the same reason they slow down to look at traffic accidents. Nobody any longer knows or cares who these toes-up people were, and the ICP curators don't even bother to explain why they might have gotten whacked.

Doesn't matter. The photos are as crisp and sharp as they'd be if the victims had been gunned down yesterday, and all you need to know to enjoy looking at them is that they used to be real live people and they aren't you.