Description
WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELLIG) SIGNED HANDWRITTEN LTR, "Love Weegee", 4 pages, 5.5 x 7, March 1963, on Mapleton Hotel, London, letterhead, to Wilma Wilcox, great content about a photographic comeback, his Mona Lisa photo, wanting cigars, and working on a new lens for his camers. In Part: "...I have really staged a photographic comeback - Life almost used my Mona Lisa pix...AIR MAIL me a 100 Robert Burns Panettellas cigars...mail the flash gun its the ACCURA GUN...in my spare time I am working on a NEW LENS. This will create a sensation, its both for movies & STILLS...." Comes with a his handwritten and signed "Weegee" envelope. The letter is in fine condition and the envelope has scotch tape on the back.
Weegee (1899-1968) was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig a famous New York City photographer and photojournalist in the 1940's and 1950's known for his stark black and white street photography: images of murder, mayhem, dead gangsters, Harlem blacks, famous personalities, and other dramatic events. His career spanned four decades on both coasts as well as Europe. His images of dead gangsters and his own flamboyant personality established his reputation as New York's "crime photographer," a reputation and persona he nurtured. The New York Museum of Modern Art acquired some his photographs and many of his images have appeared in multiple books. In the 1950's and 1960's he experimented with photo distortions and photography through prisms (kaleidoscope) that created caricatured images.
Wilma Wilcox was a Quaker social worker who Weegee lived with for over a decade before his death in 1968. She inherited his entire archive of original prints and subsequently donated them to the International Center for Photography on her death in 1993.
$625 #10752
