{"id":48594,"date":"2012-01-29T21:06:32","date_gmt":"2012-01-30T02:06:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=48594"},"modified":"2023-05-26T09:13:08","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T13:13:08","slug":"simply-add-boiling-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=48594","title":{"rendered":"Simply Add Boiling Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

Allison and I went to the International Center of Photography<\/a> today to see the Weegee exhibit. The two of us have a rather gruesome mindset in that we both love crime, the criminal mind, and murder. We love Dateline. We love anything that has to do with disappeared teenagers in the woods. We tune in. Regularly. We don’t know why we love these things. But we do. Allison remarked today, “I think there should be a show on the ID channel called ‘Blood Everywhere’ because in every show, someone says about a crime scene, “And there was blood everywhere<\/i>.” Weegee was right up our alley.<\/p>\n

The show is called MURDER IS MY BUSINESS.<\/p>\n

Those words were emblazoned on a giant wall inside the lobby and Allison and I both burst out laughing when we saw it. Clearly we are in the right place. We took pictures of each other by the giant sign.<\/p>\n

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\nThe exhibit was wonderfully done, and absolutely packed<\/i>. I love New York. You think you have an innovative original idea (“Let’s do THIS”) and you show up and 300 New Yorkers have had the same idea. The photos were sometimes gruesome, crumpled bloody bodies, but there were many that were not gruesome at all. Weegee loved Coney Island and what it represented and took many photos of outrageously crowded beaches. There were also pictures of entire families sleeping out on fire escapes during the summer. A vision of New York that may be long past, but is also still relevant and present. Times Square has been cleaned up, but we still have crime and murder and rackets and heat waves with children running through fire hydrants. There were photos along all the walls and they were extraordinary. He would arrive at crime scenes sometimes before the police (he had a police radio), and would take pictures of the dead bodies lying in doorways, or of the victims’ families, swooning in despair. People caught in moments of naked grief. The pictures are still disturbing, still moving. You get a human feeling from them, a fellow human feeling. These were people who had just lost everything. It’s morbid to think of a flash camera going off in their faces at that moment, but it’s also important to look<\/i>, to see<\/i>, to remember. That’s what Weegee’s photos made me think of. In some of the spectator shots, there are disturbing instances of people grinning gleefully at the camera over the bloody dead body. The ugliness of human nature. The gawker in us. <\/p>\n

There was also a recreation of his room, with his awesome battered Corona typewriter (I yearned to touch it), and also his camera, a giant apparatus with a flash larger than the entire contraption. I loved the objects.<\/p>\n

Weegee also chased fires. He took pictures of screaming women looking up at burning buildings, of firemen escorting frightened elderly ladies down ladders. <\/p>\n

This was my favorite photo in the entire exhibit. It is called “Simply Add Boiling Water”. Look at it closely. There are multiple levels of irony.<\/p>\n

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Allison and I went to the International Center of Photography today to see the Weegee exhibit. The two of us have a rather gruesome mindset in that we both love crime, the criminal mind, and murder. We love Dateline. We … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2088],"tags":[600,161,2693],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48594"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48594"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48606,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48594\/revisions\/48606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}