The art of Weegee

Interesting, but is it art?

Questions of that sort, often asked about the work of Norman Rockwell, were also asked about that of his contemporary, photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. The question is answered in the affirmative in the excellent biography Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous by Christopher Bonanos.

Usher Fellig was a 10-year-old Jewish immigrant when he came through Ellis Island in 1909. He soon changed his name to Arthur, but later he called himself Weegee, his spelling of Ouija, because of his apparent clairvoyance in arriving at the scene of murders and fires so soon after they happened. He worked as a freelance news photographer, selling his photos, most of them taken at night with flashbulbs, to whichever of New York’s many newspapers at the time would buy them. He insisted that his name be placed in the credit line, helping to establish his fame, as well doing a favor for generations of newspaper photographers to follow.

One of Weegee's most famous photographs shows
an intoxicated woman watching two society women
walk by outside the Metropolitan Opera.

Weegee’s photos were stark and stunning, often oddly humorous. He had a knack for including signs in the background as if in commentary on the scene. Some of best photos showed not a murder victim nor a fire but the faces of those looking at the murder victim or the fire. He was not always the most honest of news photographers, as when he placed a manikin among a crowd of onlookers at a fire.

As his fame grew and as he got older, Weegee sought easier ways to make a living. He took assignments for Life and Look magazines,  he published collections of his photographs, he spent time in Hollywood trying to get into films (you might spot him in Every Girl Should Be Married, among other movies) and took distorted portraits of famous people. He even had a few shows in art galleries, but the art world never really accepted him. He was too coarse, too common, too vulgar.

Only after his death, as with Norman Rockwell, did the artistry in his best work become apparent.

Too good to be true

All over the oil fields and through the overcrowded towns, each person had some small reason that the snowfall was for them alone, a sign that their lives were going to get better.

Paulette Jiles, Stormy Weather

Most lives did get better. In Texas during the 1930s, with Depression, drought and dust storms to contend with, there was nowhere to go but up. Paulette Jiles tells in Stormy Weather (2007), her second novel, about how one particular family of women struggle to make their lives better.

Most of the focus falls on Jeanine, Elizabeth Stoddard's middle daughter, a determined, hard-working young woman who had been her father's favorite because she had covered for him when he went out drinking and gambling, often with her in tow. Soon he's dead under embarrassing circumstances, and the four women are on their own, though not necessarily worse off than they were moving from one oil field to another with a man who wasted whatever money he made.

They return to the home of the girls' grandparents only to discover they owe back taxes. Mayme, the older sister, gets a job. Elizabeth invests what little money they have in an oil well. Bea, the youngest, dreams of becoming a writer. Jeanine, however, wants to keep the land and make it pay, drought or no drought. Soon she is forced to sell her prized possession, a horse named Smoky Joe, although she retains a 10 percent share in any money he might win in match races.

Jiles writes with a style that says literature, yet the resolution of her plot screams schlock. We expect their lives to get better. But when the drought ends, the wildcat well strikes oil, Smoky Joe wins his race, Bea makes her first magazine sale and Jeanine finds true love, it all seems too good to be true.

What does it mean?

But the universal problem of ancient vocabulary is that is that it’s just a different animal, with a different set of habits. In modern English, as a rule, you make sharply conscious, committed choices in wording, assisted by that massive vocabulary; you can be quite exact in getting your point across, but the loss is that you pick one meaning and ditch the others.

Sarah Ruden, The Face of Water

I alluded to this problem faced by Bible translators in my review of The Face of Water the other day. Each word in Hebrew and Greek, as well as other ancient languages, could have many different meanings because they had much smaller vocabularies than those of us who speak modern English. Even modern English words can have a variety of different meanings — mouse, for example, or house. But in ancient languages, meanings could be even more numerous, thus translators must make choices based on context and how the same word is used in other manuscripts from the same period. A wrong choice obviously means a wrong meaning.

One of the strengths of the Bible, as with literature in general, is that it allows for multiple meanings, from person to person, from generation to generation. It can be frustrating for a reader not to know precisely what it means, but different possible interpretations give the Bible life, vibrancy, depth. Consider the parable of the prodigal son. What it means to readers can depend upon where they place themselves in the story. Do they see themselves more as the prodigal, the older brother or perhaps even as the forgiving father or one of the servants, a neutral observer?

Too much precision in a translation can cost depth. In some translations, footnotes are included to give alternate meanings of a questionable word.

In the case of Bible paraphrases, such as The Message, things get stickier. Readers love The Message because Eugene Peterson made the Bible easy to understand, not just by using words and phrases contemporary readers can quickly grasp but also by determining for readers what each passage means. You can’t easily paraphrase something without first deciding what it means. That’s why, as a newspaper reporter, I tried to paraphrase anything a source told me that seemed at all confusing. Usually I would be told that that was precisely what was meant, but sometimes I was corrected. That wasn’t what was meant at all. With the Bible, you can’t get that sort of correction from the source. When you paraphrase, you pin down a particular meaning, whether it is the correct one or not.

Another look at the Bible

How many Bible translations do we really need? As with millionaires with their millions, it seems, just one more. Not only does the English language change, making some usages obsolete and difficult for new readers to understand, but scholarship provides new ways of understanding the ancient Hebrew and Greek scriptures. Sometimes older manuscripts are discovered, and older is better when it comes to Bible translation because those who copied books of the Bible in ancient times (Christians more than Jews) had a way of changing them. Even many centuries ago there was something like political correctness.

And so the insights of Sarah Ruden in her book The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (2017) make fascinating, if sometimes difficult, reading.

There are "large territories of meaning in a single word," she writes. Translators must try to choose the most likely meaning, while at the same time allowing other possible interpretations. The Hebrew language, in particular, can pack a lot into a single word. She cites an example of an Old Testament verse that has just 17 words in Hebrew but 33 in King James English.

Mostly what Ruden does is to discuss some of the most familiar passages in the Bible (the creation story, the 23rd Psalm, the Beatitudes, etc.), giving first the King James translation, then her own, with a variety of possible alternatives on just about every word.

My own conclusion is that the KJV, published in 1611, holds up remarkably well. Many of the changes she suggests do not really improve the text, even if they do slightly improve accuracy. Instead of the word Lamb in Revelation to refer to Jesus, she prefers "little lamb." But isn't a lamb, by definition, little? In the 23rd Psalm, she advocates "wagon-tracks of righteousness" instead of "paths of righteousness." I guess that's better than "ruts of righteousness," but there is something to be said for eloquence and grace in scripture, which is why the KJV remains the go-to translation for so many, especially when it comes to important and familiar Bible passages. Would you want "wagon-tracks of righteousness" read at your funeral?

One of her more intriguing suggestions is to translate the opening verse of John's gospel with the phrase "the Idea was with God and the Idea was God," rather than "the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

The book's subtitle may be a trifle misleading. She has translated various books of classical literature, including Augustine's Confessions, but nowhere does it say she has actually worked as a Bible translator, other than for this book. Raised a Quaker, educated at Michigan, Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Ruden has had a lifelong devotion to the Bible, whatever the translation.  “When someone gives me a Bible on the street, I take it and use it,” she writes.