Weegee the Famous

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. This is gonna not be related exactly to what we're talking about today. But Tracy, have you watched the documentary series Light and Magic? Okay, Well, it's amazing. UM if you are a film dork and you you love particularly VFX. Uh, it is about the beginnings of industrial light and magic and how all of those people really did, in their very very disorganized and wonderful creative ways, UM, change the film industry. But that is not at all what we're talking about today. We bring this up because in one of his interviews, Richard Edlund, who is one of the great uh forerunners of visual effect X, at least in the modern era, mentioned himself as a kid running around with a camera and he I don't remember the exact quote, but he says, you know, like looking like I was Wegi, and I was like, oh I forgot I had Wegi on my list. Uh. Weigi, if that name is not familiar to you, is a fairly famous photographer. UM. He's often cited as having been a really strong influence on the work of artists like Dan Arbis and Andy Warhol, but on the on a bigger scale because he's pretty unique in that a lot of people saw his work without knowing who he was, and he was also getting attention from the art world. Uh. He influenced the entire world really in how New York City was viewed by people, both people who lived in the city and people outside of it, because he really showed the city through his lens in a way that was very unvarnished and raw, in stark black and white. So that is who we are talking about today. So he's known as we G today. He was born Usher Felic in Zulichev, which at the time was in Austria Hungary now it's in Ukraine. That was on June twelf and when he was seven, his father, Bernard left for the United States, so Usher and his mother and his three siblings stayed behind. They were there for the next four years while Bernard was working on all kinds of jobs, just trying to get settled enough that he could send for the rest of the family and have them join him in the US. At one point early on, he sent his wife some stage money as a joke. She initially thought it was real. I'm a little just irritated by this story. Uh. She packed herself up at the children and got ready for a move, and the bank also initially thought this was real and exchanged this currency. They figured it out though, before the family left for the US and they had to cancel their move. Yeah, I mean, uh, this is all based on of course, we's later recollections, and he's known for kind of embellishment and whatnot. But the way he describes the money, it had some pretty key indicators that it was fake, like a joker on the back and stuff, but like not legal tender and right, and it wasn't like from a game. It was like to be used in a play. It was stage money, but apparently good enough to fool a bank. But they did eventually make it in nineteen o six, when Usher was still ten, the family was finally reunited. At that point, Bernard had started a push cart of his own to make money because he had just struggled so much trying to get other people to give him an opportunity that actually paid a decent living wage. This was a lesson that I think you can see as we talk about Wei's life story, it clearly imprinted on his son, Usher, and in later years, Ogi wrote about coming to the United States and said that Ellis Island seemed quote the most beautiful place in the world, even as immigration officials inspected him and his family to make sure they weren't bringing disease into the country. But what really struck this ten year old boy was being given fresh fruit while he was there. He had never, he said, seen a banana or an orange before. And his name also changed at this point, at least on paper, to Arthur. He does not appear to have ever gone by that name, and his family certainly didn't use it, but in the United States and in biographies, she'll often see him listed as Arthur Felik. The family moved soon after that from Bernard's Lower East Side tenement apartment on Pitt Street to another at the corner of Cherry and Jackson that was right next to a public school, and his father had negotiated for the family to live there for free because he and his wife were going to do all the buildings janitorial work. They still struggled financially, they were still trying to learn English. They were often called out as oigners, but we do described his family as having a pretty happy time during this point in his life. Yeah, he's he whether or not he is um glossing over it or making it sound better than it was because he talks about going hungry sometimes. He still talks about like it was pretty carefree though for me, and I really liked my childhood. As he was learning English, Usher at the time became engrossed in the stories of Horatio Alger, who famously popularized the rags to riches story in popular novels. The young Fellig was convinced that he too could amass wealth if he just worked hard enough, just like the boys in the books. So he started his own paper route just pretty enterprising. But the problem was he could only get English language papers, and most of his neighbors were immigrants to They could not read English well enough to want to buy a daily paper, so that didn't pan out. Usher moved on to reading detective novels and transitioned his person no business to selling candy. He started out by purchasing the candy on credit. He somehow talked to a store manager into allowing him to do this, and then he took the candy cart around to the sweatshops in the neighborhood after school. He would sell things like chocolate and chewing gum to the women who were working in these sweatshops during their breaks. He reported making a hundred percent profit from this enterprise, and he gave all of his earnings to his parents to just keep the family fed and clothed. When Usher was fourteen, he quit school. He was a smart kid and he did pretty well, but he found it very boring compared to the rest of his life. He also was known to sleep in and he would kind of sleep until he heard the bell, and then, since he lived right next door to the school, he would just kind of run over, looking completely disheveled, and start his day. Although his principle really tried to get him to finish school because he was pretty smart, the family really needed more money than he was pulling in with his after school candy car, and he had already become fascinated with photography before he had left school. A street photographer had taken his picture with a tin type camera. Those were the cameras that captured images on sheets of metal that had a dark lacquer coating. This whole experience had really captivated him. He saved up enough money to order his own inexpensive tin type camera, so he did manage to get an eight am to six pm job with a photography studio after a few months of working with this tin type. He definitely saw this as a way to continue his education and learn from actual photographers. That studio specialized in taking photographs of large objects that door to door salesman would then use to make their pitches to potential buyers. It of course, was not realistic to carry things like furniture, chandeliers, and headstones around to make sales, and Ushered worked as an assistant, positioning the products and the lights as directed, and just trying to make everything look as good as possible for these photos. He also ran errands. He swept up after shoots. He did basically all of the jobs that the lowest man on the ladder would be assigned. The other area of specialty for this photography business was taking photos of burned out buildings for insurance filings. Usher was in charge at these shoots of blowing flash powder. He described blowing the powder through a tube onto alcohol soaked rags to ignite that powder and light up the photograph. It's probably informed his later work doing a lot of night photography. But for all of this work, some of it pretty dangerous. The flash powder not always very safe to be around. He made four fifty a week. So two years and his job, the camera operator left and Usher was promoted into that vacant position. When his boss refused to pay him even half of what the previous camera operator had made, Usher quit on the spot. This might sound rash for somebody who was helping to support his family, but Usher had a whole other income stream because he was still selling candy on the side, although his later work hours had led to him transitioning to selling this candy at burlesque clubs instead of it factories. And at this point Usher was eighteen, So he bought himself of you camera and he started his first career as a freelancer. And he was really really pretty smart. You'll see throughout his story he's pretty savvy about business. Uh. He he kind of made his own customer base, so he would take photographs of children on the weekends riding a pony that he rented. Basically, he would just get neighborhood kids and put him on this pony and take their picture, and then once he had developed the proofs, he would visit those kids parents, show them nose proofs, and then be like, don't you want to order some prints. He later wrote that he believed that there was not a single East Side home that didn't have one of his photos of a child on a pony sitting in it. But once boarding the pony outpaced his income, he had to give that enterprise up. This is the time of restlessness for Usher. He wanted to move out on his own. Although this was painful for his family, they were really close knit, it was upsetting to his mother. In particular, she caught him trying to leave with a suitcase and was so upset about it that he stayed. A few weeks later, he sneaked away when the rest of the family was asleep. This was a bold and kind of foolhardy move. He didn't have money or a job or a place to stay, so he was sleeping in parks and missions, but eventually started spending the night at Pennsylvania Station. He had a whole routine where every night he would check the pay phones for loose change, and then he would find a bench in the waiting room to sleep on until police came to move people out in the morning. We G wrote in his autobiography that he would tip the officers a dime to let him sleep a little long. Younger, he was finally able to find some work as a bus boy in an automatic restaurant. This was part time work. It was ten thirty am to two thirty pm, basically to cover the lunch hours, but it also included a light breakfast beforehand and then all the leftover unpurchased items when lunch was over, as well as being paid a dollar a day. This is a pretty good deal at the time. He spent twenty five cents a night to rent a room, and he spent the extra available time looking for more photography jobs. He claimed that he eventually got himself fired from the automatic job on purpose because he felt like as long as he stayed there he was doing well enough that he was not working as hard as he should to get a photography job. We don't really know if he got fired on purpose or if he got fired because he did something actually wrong, but he definitely lost the job. Uh And after that he took some day labor jobs, mostly in factories, until he found a job taking passport photos. He was really good at this passport job because he managed to sell people who only needed to photos for their travel documents entire baggages of portraits for twenty five dollars each. Having had multiple passport photos, I'm also impressed that they were photos anyone would want to half of themselves, right, I don't want more of those. His boss increased his salary from fifteen dollars a week to forty dollars, and he described this period in his life is living it up. He was a young man making great money, and he partied a lot. But after three years of the job at the Passport studio, twenty four year old Ushert took a fifty percent pay cut to start working at ACME News Pictures in and we will talk about Wegi's time at ACNE after we first pause for a sponsor break. We mentioned that we started at ACMEE New Pictures in and that was the year that ACMEE had started. It was a subsidiary of Scripps Howard and this was essentially set up to be an in house source of imagery for the scripts Howard News syndicate, including the New York Herald Tribune, and Usher was hired to work in the dark room, developing photos and making prints. He made it known that he wanted to be a photographer, but because he was unwilling to agree to the dress code of shirt and tie, he only got sent out on night jobs, kind of an emergency situations. This actually aligned pretty nicely though, with Usher's desires. He loved taking photos of New York's night happenings, and a lot of his work on those early assignments was taking pictures of fires. He was really glad to be shooting more dynamic moments instead of things like passport photos, and he recognized that working in the dark room had actually made him think about how his photos would develop, so he had a stronger eye for catching moments that if he had not been doing that job. He was working in the news photo business and a really unique time. He was seeing all of the events of the time as they developed under his hands. But he also saw the transition from flash powder to flash bulbs, and he saw the shifting roll of news photographer as subjects like presidents became important to capture. Keep in mind, it was only in the late nineteen teens that newspapers started running photographs with stories instead of illustrations, so it was really the start of the field of photojournalism. We do it later write that he and photography were growing up at the same time. He also saw during this work that speed was vital. Whichever outlets got their negatives to the telephone company's distribution offices first ensured that their credit was the one that the entire country would see. So while it act me, Usher came up with some fairly ingenious and slightly sneaky ways to get ahead of the competition. For example, he would ren an ambulance to go out on a job, then have it parked and waiting while the shots were being taken. And then when he finished photographing and he jumped back in the vehicle, the sirens were turned on and they could zip downtown while Usher developed the photos in the back of the ambulance. He knew if he got caught doing this, he was going to get in trouble, so he would change it up sometimes with things like taxis and trains and all was doing this mobile developing, which is pretty impressive. On one shoot, he said that he locked himself in an empty subway trains motorman's booth and developed the glass plate negative in there before he got to his stop. Also, unbeknownst to his bosses, Usher moved into the dark room at ACME. He kept the makings of a bed in his locker. He would pull them out at night after everybody left. He cooked out of cans on the engraver's stove, and he loved that he did not have any neighbors. After a lifetime of living in cramped rental spaces, he was actually pretty happy with this whole arrange. S mint he outed himself to his bosses. When the United Press ticker machine went off at four a m. On September three that was alerting news outlets to the crash of the Navy dirigible the USS Shenandoah, that crashed in Ohio. He decided the story was more important than his secret about living there in the dark room, so he called his bosses. So this ended his sleeping arrangements. But ACNE got photos from the crash site before anybody else, since all of the other news photographers got the message when they arrived at work in the morning, hours after Usher and his bosses had already ensured that a cameraman in Ohio could get the shot and then send it via train porter to New York. The other offshoot of having his squatting in the office suddenly out in the open was that his bosses actually realized he was pretty happy to take photography jobs at all hours. He was clearly a night owl, so when news broke outside of the usual nine to five workday, it just started to be Usher that they called instead of one of the regular staff photographers. He had an ear to the ground approach to getting shots of crime scenes, and he moved really fast to get to the sites and take the pictures. And that's been said as something that led to that widely known moniker of Weiji. It's a phonetic version of the commonly mispronounced word wijia, and cops started calling Usher that because it seemed like he was psychic. He would show up at crime scenes even before the police got there on occasion, but according to Weigi himself, it was actually given to him by young women around the office. Either way, this name stuck and he liked it and he started using it. And after twelve years at ACME, Weigi was starting to feel restless and like his day to day had actually grown kind of scale. He was ready to do more photography of the things he chose, rather than waiting and hoping for assignments while he was developing the work of other photographers. So in five if he gave two weeks notice and once again returned to his freelance instincts. Because of his ears with Acme, Weigi knew the police around Manhattan, so as a freelancer he started hanging out at police headquarters. They didn't have press credentials, but cops had seen so much of him that they assumed that he did. He would actually pull the teletype slips off of the machines and then hand them over to police reporters, and so when they'd catch a story, he would just finagle a ride along with them. He later wrote of this time quote, crime was my oyster, and I liked it my post graduate course in life and photography. He also, somehow during this time, had finagled getting the key to the dark room at the New York Post, so he would develop his prints there and then he would give that outlet first DIBs on the shots that he had, and then he would make the rounds at other papers to sell his photos. He also wrote about this time why he felt his work was taking off and why those often grizzly images of people who had been shot or were in car accidents or we're trying to escape tenement fires were so appealing to readers. He wrote, quote, it was during the depression and people could forget their own troubles by reading about others. And Weiji was smart about hustling. And instances where there were photos with two people, like a cop in the man he had just arrested, Weji would cut the photo in half and sell each half as a separate image that would double his income. He also knew some papers wanted not just crime photos but also things like cute animal shots, so he cut deals with all the local fire stations to call him if any of their dogs ever had any litters. He would stage cute pictures of the mother and babies. He was basically always working as many angles as he could to sell as many photos as he could, and surprisingly he sold a lot of them to tabloids whose readers Wegi described as needing quote their daily blood bath and sex potion to go with the wreck fist. And though he had left Acne because he had gotten bored there he still had a really good relationship with them. He left on good terms, and he specifically had a good relationship with the photo editor there. He later said that he always saved the best photographs for ACME and that he knew he would always make a sale there. He later lamented, though, that he had been so good at providing such a steady stream of crime scene photos, editors got choosy, readers were less and less enthralled. Just as his cash at was dwindling, he managed to get photos of a couple of teenagers, Gladys McKnight and her boyfriend who had committed a grizzly murder. Through his connections and a friends, he had been the only photographer allowed to meet and take photos of the couple. He sold these to every paper in town After that. His name on a photo byline had enough cloud that photo editors were no longer jaded with his crime scene shots. At some point he started stamp being his photo prints with the imprint by Weiji. The famous Life magazine even ran a story about Wigi and his work and his close ties to police headquarters. Yeah, those photographs are super duper weird um that he got of those teenagers Gladys and her boyfriend killed Gladys's mother in a very gruesome way. But the photos that he took of them looked like engagement photos. It's really creepy and weird. That's very creepy, it is, but it's why people all wanted to buy them. Uh. And that is how three years into his post Acme freelance career, Wegi, who had gotten famous at this point, got permission to install a police radio right in his own car. This meant that he was more or less guaranteed to always be the first photographer on site for any emergency murder, rescue, fire, or accident. He was able to get shots before crowds had even formed, adding to the intimacy of his lenses point of view. He turned his car, which was d H Chevy coupe, into a mobile photo studio. He carried camera equipment, protective gear, food, extra clothes, and even disguises in the trunk. In nineteen forty, he started working regularly with the magazine PM magazine. This was on a salary. That relationship lasted four and a half years, and during that time he got paid every week whether he brought in images or not. He was also given the freedom to make his own assignments. He worked with the Daily News, The Herald Tribune, the Sun, and as we mentioned the post, the decade of the nineteen forties was the apex of his career. In addition to those papers all pretty regularly purchasing photographs, The New York Photo League had also taken notice of Luigi's work, and in nineteen forty one, the organization staged an exhibit of that work. Two years later, his photos started to go on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Yeah, that relationship with PM magazine only ended because the magazine went bankrupt, not because he had any falling out with him. He quite liked them. Not all of Wegi's photographs, we should say, were of crimes and the people involved in them. He also took photos, sometimes with very clear social commentary. One of his most famous photographs during this time was called The Critic, and it was taken in ninette. It features two society women in fancy dress with white fur capes, and they have these sort of benign, pleasant expressions, and they're walking by another woman who has dressed much more humbly. That third woman is in profile. She has a slumping posture, and she appears to be sneering at the other two women judgmentally. We're gonna talk about this image some more in a minute, but it was widely praised as a social commentary illustrating the values of the working class versus the wealthy. He also took more joyous photos. He took a photo in ninety one called Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island. This has literally thousands of people in it. They're all crowded onto the beach. From his vantage point above them, he yelled and got their attention, and when a lot of people turned to face him, weg snapped the picture. He also took pictures in places like movie theaters, using infrared film to capture the goings on of the crowd even in the dark. He took a lot of photographs at a place called Sammy's Bowery Follies, which was a club full of performers and clients held that one might describe as being from the fringes of society at the time. They were mixing with celebrities who dropped in for a show or a drink, and he captured the culture and music scene of Harlem and a number of gorgeous photographs. Yeah, those are some of my favorite pictures from him because they're just they're always super beautiful. Um. There's one really, really great one where he took a photo of a family as they were leaving church on Easter Sunday, and when he stopped to talk to them, the man had said, oh, I actually sell close, and he was like, well, that's why you look so sharp, and can I take your picture? And it's this great picture. They're all smiling, they all look beautiful. But the great part is there's this kid who is part of the family and he's dressed super sharp, but he's kind of leaning around from behind what I presume as his dad, and he has this great smile on his face and it's just this like spectacular capture of a moment. We are going to talk about four a into the book world. After we first hear from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class, Going published his first book, titled Naked City, and he actually had a pretty hard time finding a publisher. It would take his collection of raw, gritty photos. Most publishers also wanted more kitchy and predictable images of the city, which were the kinds of photos that Wigi simply did not take. He had murders and odd ball street characters and buildings on fire, and it was all in black and white. For example, one of the images was a group of kids and a woman, all with a very wide range of expressions on their faces. You would have no idea what they were experiencing if it did not have the title their First Murder. The caption that he had written for it read a woman relative cried, but neighborhood dead end kids enjoyed the show when a small time racketeer was shot and killed, and the image that he paired this with was a photograph of the murder victim on the ground. Finally, he wrote quote the miracle happened the book was published. He had his book party, not at a swank hotel, but it's Sammy's Naked City was a huge success, and it opened the door for him to work for a time at Vogue, and it also made it a lot easier for him to publish the second book, which was Weigi's People, and that came out in n Yeah it is. He doesn't seem to have had a bad relationship at Vogue, but that was not a good pairing. It doesn't seem like a great fit. Really no. He tells a story in his autobiography about how his editor was like, you have to buy a tuxedo because I keep finding out that you weren't let into events because you didn't look nice enough, and I actually need you to get into events to take pictures. Um it's he got like a secondhand tuxedo and you know, war it all the time because he couldn't afford another suit. He said. Uh. In ninety seven, Wigi moved to Hollywood and he stayed there for five years. During that time, he worked as an advisor on films he occasionally ended up appearing in bit parts. One of the most enduring legacies of this time there is the work he did creating promotional photographs from the set of Doctor Strange Love. If you are a movie buff and you have seen photographs of the pie fight ending of Doctor Strange Love, that has never been seen because Kubrick changed his mind and destroyed the negative. Those photos were shot by Weigi, and his pictures are the only proof that that abandoned ending ever existed. In nineteen fifty two, he returned to New York. He published a book of photographs from his time in California the following year that was called Naked Hollywood. The images in this book examined celebrity and the culture surrounding it, as well as ideas of beauty. One series of photos shows a young woman in a crowd, first smiling and then looking worried, and then in the third and fourth shots breaking down into tears. It's easy to think the photographer had managed to be there when she got terrible news, but the caption reads quote an American tragedy, no autograph. We G also started to play with images of beauty in ways that often made them look grotesque or absurd, and he called these elastic photos. On one of them, he manipulated a photograph of film star Virginia May, and he made her look really freakish by printing her in a distorted and mirrored way. He basically like cut her off about one third of the way into her image and then mirrored that so the middle was cut out, and then he had like this strange double image of her. It made her appear to have two faces and no arms. Uh, it's interesting, it's weird. He also took a close up photo of Marilyn Monroe, and he squashed sections of the image, so she, who everyone agreed with spectacularly beautiful, came to look almost like a monster or a fun house version of herself. But the absurdity of Hollywood was something that we G also played with by using himself as the subject of the pictures. In one image, he took a photo of several shelves full of wax heads of celebrities, and his own head is among them. He definitely always seemed to love being part of a spectacle, and a lot of biographers and historians have written pretty extensively about his exhibitionist side as juxtaposed with his observer photographer side. Back in New York, he continued to experiment with his elastic photography, but it just wasn't all that popular. Some of the photos from this period and his life are quite charming, though, One titled Boy meets Girl from Mars features a man and a woman in a passionate embrace, but both of them are wearing future stick clothes and helmets. Throughout the nineteen fifties, it sort of seemed like he was trying to find a new voice in his work. He went to Europe, he came back to the States, he took sexy photos of Betty Page on a New Jersey farm. He played with image manipulation, but he never found a second wave of iconic style like those earlier gritty New York images he had created. He also made a nudist film of himself strikes most people as a little odd. Yeah, it's the strange little plot, his strange little foray. He he dabbled in nudism, and that film is, uh, it's very it's like a very strange arthouse film. When Weigi wrote his autobiography in nineteen sixty one, he dedicated it to the tool that has made his career writing, quote to my modern Aladdin's lamp, my camera. And you get a sense of the man immediately from the opening paragraph of the book, which reads, quote, my typewriter is broken. I own no dictionary, and I ever claimed I could spell. And if Shakespeare, Balzac and Dostoyevski could do it the hard way in Longhand so can I. He continues on to say that he doesn't need a ghost writer, and he has no creative inhibitions, and that quote what may be abnormal to you is normal to me. If I had to live my life over again, I would do it all the same way, only more so. It's a very fun read, although there's a lot of talk about his womanizing and some pretty detailed discussion of the sex workers of New York at the time, which comes along with a significant amount of misogyny. He talks, for example, about Saturday being the day of the week that he went to various addresses that were shared among the men that he knew as being the addresses of sex workers. Has talk about this isn't violent or scary, but it's detached and too humanized, and most historians encouraged taking a lot of this autobiography with a grain of salt. He is, as promised, pretty uninhibited in telling his story. He doesn't make himself out as a hero or anything, but he is very confident to the edge of cockiness about his work, and he does tend to center himself in every possible way. He's open about scenes that got to him. For example, he describes getting two scenes where people jump to their deaths and driving right by rather than stopping to take the picture, choosing not to stop because he knew he couldn't handle it, and then going home for the night. He's also open about a scene where he photographed a woman and her adult daughter as they found out that two of her younger children had burned to death, and that he cried when he took the photo, writing quote, the image of two crying women was to haunt me for the rest of my life. I was raised in a tenement, and I just couldn't escape them. It didn't bother him to take pictures of murdered gangsters, but family tragedies really upset him. He also mentioned that after being really shaken by photographing so many car crashes of vehicles that had crashed onto the street under the West Side Highway after losing control, he launched his own campaign to photograph the lack of safety at that site and to sell those two newspapers to run as a story about the problem. This got the city to finally add reflective markers to the abutments in the road, and of this effort, he wrote, quote this work I consider my memorial. What he doesn't include in that autobiography is any mention of his wife, Wilma Wilcox, who he had married a number of years before writing it, whether she was chagrined to have been left out, we do not know. He also, in talking about the many many women with which he claimed to have been intimate, never mentions an earlier marriage that didn't last very long. He seems, of course, to have been uninhibited talking about himself only in some ways. Apparently. Wilma and Luigi had known each other since the nineteen forty She was a social worker and a Quaker, and we she had come to depend on her after he was diagnosed with diabetes in the late nineteen fifties. Weig died on December nine, sixty eight in New York City, and Wilma was kind of the steward of his photograph collection after that. Part of the unique appeal of Weiji, both when he was working and now is how much his photos made the viewer feel like they were part of the scene. The way his work is composed often makes you feel like you're standing right in the middle of the action as it's going on. During his career, this gave his images appeal for the press, it made every story more real for the readers, and then today it offers a unique documentary view of the New York that he lived and worked in. But there have always been questions about whether these were all caught in the moment, and there have been instances where he confessed that some of his shots were staged, at least partially. For example, his photo The Critic that we talked about earlier, which was so acclaimed as a commentary on class, was actually somewhat contrived. The woman in the photo looking at the two wealthy socialites with disdain was a heavy drinker who was known around the Bowery, and Weiji confessed in a book written several years after the photo was taken that he had had his assistant at the time, Louis Leota, by her drinks until she was very intoxicated, and then they essentially propped her up on the street outside the met as limousines were pulling up to drop off opera goers. She is probably not looking at them with any kind of scorn. She's just very, very drunk and trying to fix her eye on something. Even with those kinds of manipulations, Weigi is recognized as an exceptional figure in photographic art. He was famous and both popular publishing and art circles in his lifetime. He figured out a way to exist as an artist on his own terms. In part because he had basically gotten in on the ground floor of photojournalism, and he remains fascinating today. His crime scene photos are still jarring and evocative and intriguing, and his other work continues to be examined and interpreted as photography buffs and biographers try to kind of tease out where the balance was between Usher Felig and Luigi. I highly encourage looking at lots of his work because it's very interesting because said some of it is obviously graphic. Yeah, there's so much of it online and I don't know if it's the entire collection of his artwork, but if you just google Luigi, there's a whole website that's collected right there, that's in tons of tense. Uh, you have a library card. I almost guarantee your local library has a book with photographs by him. They are everywhere. Um. I am jumping tone so significantly to our listener mail today. This is from our listener Kate, who writes High Ladies. I'm a longtime listener who saves your podcast epis, so it's to binge listen on my many drives from Kansas to Minnesota and back again. This has been a major sanity saver as my dog, Twilight photos attached is not the most talkative travel companion. Twilight is cute. Yesterday, toward the end of my third round trip to Minnesota this summer, I reached the episode on Dr Lucy Hobbs Taylor. I was delightfully surprised to find that her life's journey took her to the exact place I was traveling to and have called home for four years, Lawrence, Kansas. I drove by her Vermont Street residence uh photos also attached on my way to work this morning. There's a lovely private orchard between her former home and would you believe it, a dental practice called the Dentists in Lawrence. There are many historical buildings in the city of Lawrence, including a few on the University of Kansas campus, but I didn't know until today that Dr Hobbs Taylor's house was one of them. Thank you for teaching me something new about my own community. In addition to all the other incredible things your podcast covers, history really is all around us. Um. That seems so fun to me to like discover that a major prominent person in history, who again we all need dental work at some point in time. Um, you know, helped shape a field that is so vital to everybody's health and well being. Uh so, I love it. I love it. Thank you so much Kate for writing us this letter. I hope that you had a lot of fun exploring and discovering these places. I had read that there was an orchard near her house, and I have never gotten to see a good picture of it, so it was exciting. Um. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History, and if you have not subscribed yet, you can do that quick as a wink on the I heart Radio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows. Stop you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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