Weegee's story. From the Berinson Collection

If you lived in New York in the late 1930s and 1940s, you couldn't escape the photography of a character named Weegee. His newspaper images of wild-eyed criminals, sobbing victims, hardened cops and nosy bystanders captured the city, and his extraordinarily human portraits of everyday people, socialites and celebrities symbolized Depression and World War II-era New York for generations to come. The Philadelphia Art Alliance is hosting a traveling exhibition of more than 200 of Weegee's photographs. They include shots of life in the city's immigrant neighborhoods, the cabaret entertainment in the Bowery, the crowds at Coney Island and, perhaps most memorably, the notorious mobsters and murderers, thieves and bandits, often at the grisly scenes of their crimes. A one-time "squeegee boy" in the New York Times darkroom (he removed excess water from prints to prepare them for the engraver), the Eastern European immigrant started at Acme Newspictures syndicate. But he quickly realized he could sell his too-close-for-comfort, first-eyewitness images to any paper he wanted. Stowing a police radio and a typewriter in the trunk of his car, he followed the news. And later, at a startup newspaper called PM Daily, Weegee was given the freedom and recognition he so craved, going as far as he wanted for a picture and writing his own usually biased and witty captions. By the 1950s, after he had been to Hollywood and back, Weegee started to fancy himself an artist, and he had honed his camera and darkroom skills to the point of real experimentation; he placed negatives in boiling water and put a kaleidoscope at the end of a lens just to see what would happen. A shameless self-promoter who dubbed himself Weegee the Famous, the portly, well-liked man was also one of the most sought-after photojournalists of the time, whose influence is obvious today.