Photographing the Naked City

Now that I have a few things off the table, I’m gearing up for Season 2 of The Naked City, and in preparation for it, I’m checking out the photography of Arthur Fellig aka Weegee whose dispatches from the streets of New York informed the gritty style of The Naked City film and the television series that followed. Weegee also loaned the title Naked City to the film’s producer Mark Hellinger (Naked City was the title of his first book of photographs) and something of the shock and confrontational power of that title can still be felt in his crime photographs, many of which are have colonized popular culture, like the “Corpse With Gun” photograph from 1940 (pictured below) which appropriately enough adorns the cover of John Zorn’s Naked City album, or the 1942 picture “Arrested for Bribing Basketball Players” which was used as the cover of Penguin’s Raymond Chandler collection The Big Sleep and Other Novels. For more Weegee crime photographs, follow this link to Google Images