Gotham-mayhem pics still jolt while Hollywood-glam pics merely amuse.

I’ m always up for Weegee. That’s Arthur Fellig (1899–1968), the brewed-in-bitters photojournalist whose snaps of slugged gangsters and crashed cars showed us what’s always to be found under Gotham’s rock. Blood, gore, fire, and freaks were his specialties in the 1930s and ’40s, conveyed with go-for-the-jugular finesse, even, odd to say, poetry. Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is the new exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. The ICP owns Weegee’s archive, some 20,000 photographs and negatives and his ephemera files. It’s Weegee Central, which also makes it a center in the study of film noir aesthetics. It’s the sixth big Weegee exhibition the museum has mounted, and this one’s curated by Clément Chéroux, the director of the superb Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Society of the Spectacle compares, contrasts, and unites what it calls two Weegees. The first — and famous — Weegee is the one in his New York years. The second, whom I didn’t know, is from his time, at the end of his career, in Hollywood, where he photographed aspects of celebrity culture. The two have been treated separately, or the Hollywood years ignored. They’re diametrically opposed. It’s worth a stab, apologies to Mack the Knife and scarlet billows notwithstanding, but it doesn’t work since the two phases are beyond balance. One is defining while the other is fringe. By the end, the exhibition surrenders its argument. Still, it’s worth seeing, as is the ICP, among New York’s most quixotic art spaces.

Society of the Spectacle starts strongly, even fiercely. “News photography is my meat,” Weegee said, vegans be damned, no chardonnay needed, a cigar and a flask of honest hooch preferred. “I’m a doer, not a thinker,” he added, so it’s no surprise to learn that he didn’t go to an Ivy League journalism school. I doubt his trouser creases were perfect, or that he pampered himself much with warm fuzzies like diversity, equity, and inclusion. Most high-end journalists think of themselves as intellectuals, as advocates, but the best reporters are hustlers and cynics, with an eye for inexplicable extremes or telling nuances and a feel for the night. And I can’t imagine Weegee crying about “norms” taking it on the chin. All Weegee’s photographs are black-and-white, but most are nocturnes, too. We don’t need color to know a river of blood when we see one. Against a concrete sidewalk or a parking lot, it looks black and terrible.

Weegee in the Flesh introduces us to the artist via self-portraits of him in his pigpen of a studio/bedroom, posed for a mock mug shot, or working in a makeshift office in the trunk of his car. Born in what is now western Ukraine, he came to America as a child, settling with his family on the Lower East Side, near what’s now the ICP and in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood. He learned photography on his own, worked for what’s now United Press International, and, starting in the mid-1930s, made a living as a freelancer. Glued to a police-band shortwave radio, he’d rush to pictorially promising crime scenes or car crashes or fires, often arriving before the cops. He’d snap, print, and sell, mostly to tabloids such as the Daily News and the Daily Mirror.

“I used to be an expert on murder,” Weegee once said. Except for Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Civil War photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan, which I doubt Weegee knew, there’s isn’t much visual history leading us to Weegee. He’s no sentimentalist. Murder Victim, from 1940, made me think of Manet’s Dead Toreador or Mantegna’s Dead Christ, but only for a moment. Weegee’s corpses might be lying flat forever, but there’s no elegance here. Weegee is gung ho for a gut reaction. In this respect, he’s got a niche in American art history.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many American artists, from Winslow Homer to the Ashcan artists, come from a newspaper background. Americans have always been news-crazy, in part because we’ve always been a literate country, in part because of the country’s sprawl, and in part because knowing the news is part of citizenship. We’ve always lived in the here and now, too, and things that change from moment to moment are the raw material for newspapers. Artists coming from newspapers, or from commercial advertising, understand how to convey a meaty — or bloody or incendiary — story in an instant, if only because American attention spans are short. There’s always another story to tempt.

The Critic has pride of place in the show. Weegee considered it his masterpiece, calling it “the best picture I ever took.” I’m afraid he doesn’t do himself justice. The photograph of two high-society women, in tiaras and furs, entering an opera gala, with a grungy lady sneering at them, is too obvious. Anyway, it was staged. The figure on the right is an intoxicated regular from a local bar. After plying her with wine, he hauled her until he found what is, I admit, a pair of ladies who are true relics of an Edith Wharton novel. It’s from 1943, when Weegee worked for PM, the socialist-oriented daily newspaper in New York City. The ladies are attending the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s 60th season. Lady Elizabeth Decies, on the right, was a three-times-married Drexel heiress; she’s wearing a Cartier tiara. Her companion, resplendent in white and diamonds, was Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh, originally from Syracuse. Both women knew Weegee and posed for him.

Weegee also photographed big crowd scenes, with a mass of people creating a single motif, and spectators. He used infrared film in darkened movie theaters to get spontaneous expressions, because, he said, “people freeze whenever they see a camera otherwise.” I’m surprised, given that the curator has thousands of Weegee images from which to choose, that he selected so many banal scenes. I Cried When I Took This Picture is Weegee’s photograph from 1939 of a mother and daughter who, having escaped from a Brooklyn tenement fire, are watching less fortunate family members die. It’s honest and raw. Others photos are either insipid or, as when he photographs a human cannonball, freak-show fare. I loved the sections on the recently arrested in the paddy wagon, with some covering their faces. Very fun, they convey the different psychologies of the humiliated and the pure hams.

We don’t learn much, either from the exhibition or the book, about Weegee in Hollywood. Weegee’s blockbuster book of photographs, Naked City, was published in 1945. The title and aesthetics inspired a movie and a pioneering TV series. We see that he did lots of caricatures, and they’re fun. He used what he called an elastic lens to distort the faces of his subjects. Lots of them are in the exhibition along with information on his technique, which is understandable since the ICP is both a museum and an important school of photography. Photographs of President Kennedy, de Gaulle, Khrushchev, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Beatles show us that Weegee might have found a niche in the psychedelic moment.

“I’m called Weegee,” the artist said, after “Ouija,” the board used in séances to communicate with the dead. He thought of himself as a “psychic photographer” who could sense where and when news stories with juicy visuals would happen. I was intrigued, having dabbled in Ouija conversations, but beyond a couple of quotes in the catalogue and in a label, the theme dies.

Isabelle Bonnet’s catalogue essay on the development of crime-scene journalism is great. There wasn’t much interest among the public in crime scenes until the early years of the last century, when detective novels grabbed an audience. Prohibition-era gang murders, noisy and lurid, met new tabloids and better photography to develop the market. What Weegee pioneered was a style that went beyond police photography, geared as it was to recording and gathering evidence, and into the realm of art. Weegee’s first exhibition was Murder Is My Business, held in 1941. It gave detective novels an aesthetic and gangster movies a touch of class.

David Campany’s essay on Weegee and Stanley Kubrick is good, too, though impressionistic. Kubrick started his career in newspaper photography, liking its raw, rough content and especially its glaring light. Naturally, Weegee counted among Kubrick’s rivals. He hired Weegee, who by 1963 was working in Hollywood, to do on-set photography during the making of Dr. Strangelove. I didn’t know that the final scene of the firm originally was an eleven-minute, epic, fittingly juvenile custard-pie fight among the generals and politicians in the war room as missiles headed to annihilate the U.S. and Russia. Peter Sellers, playing the American president and two other parts, gets a pie smack in the face. After the Kennedy assassination, when the film was in its final edit, Kubrick thought the scene too comic, at which point he replaced the pie fight with Slim Pickens’s rodeo ride to eternity.

I would have made the most of these themes and ditched most of the caricatures. As it stands, Weegee’s Hollywood years seem very flimsy, so the exhibition fails in its own goal, which is to integrate the New York Weegee with his Hollywood years. Still, I recommend Society of the Spectacle for its good work by Weegee and, overall, a visit to the ICP. It’s easy to find and steps from the subway.

American Job, an exhibition drawing from the ICP’s permanent collection, is an incontinent look at the American organized-labor movement. It’s predictable and too big, taking space that the Weegee show could have used. Around 34 percent of public employees are unionized as opposed to around 5 percent of private-sector workers, but public-employee unions, especially teachers’ unions, are barely represented. Intellectually, this puts American Job at odds with reality. Many public employees, of course, enjoy what amounts to tenure and retire rich because of salaries, benefits, and pensions far exceeding those of industrial workers. So much for the romance of the oppressed worker. Blind spots aside, the ICP’s ambiance is a pleasure. It’s been in its new, purpose-built home since 2020. Around 3,500 students take classes there each year, which makes for even more positive energy.