Through the lens of obsession: On Nobuyoshi Araki, Enrique Metinides and Weegee

I was very lucky—John Berger was one of my tutors on the BA (Hons) course I attended at the LCP in the 1970s in London. He taught us to see—not just to look. To see everything and to see it in the way that taught us to record it for others. If one is to become a great photographer, which is what I wanted to be, one had to not only be fluent at seeing, but also fluent in communicating what we saw to others. That, I found very difficult to do—but I found I could empathise with those who had found their path to vivid visual communication. The three photographers chosen here were able to do exactly that.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Enrique Metinides, and Arthur Fellig, aka. Weegee: three extraordinary photographers whose livelihoods became intertwined with many strange and, often, extremely challenging moments of the 20th century. Each of them recorded remarkable aspects of their lives and times in their own inimitable way, leaving indelible footprints on the photographic canon. They also happen to be three photographers who I have spent many years of my own life observing. I was fortunate to know two of them quite well, which allowed me to develop a personal perspective on the influence that their lives cast over their work.

I spent time with both Araki and Metinides—neither of whom were characters I could have imagined encountering at the start of my 45-year love affair with the furthest reaches of photography. I would like to have met Weegee too, but he was gone sadly before I knew anything about him. He was to enter my life through a different path, however—cinema—as a chosen artist of my favourite director, Stanley Kubrick. Weegee was Kubrick’s photographer of choice on the set of Dr. Strangelove (1964), and it was in fact Weegee’s voice, with its distinctive accent, that Peter Sellers adopted for his superlative performance as Dr. Strangelove himself. Strangely, Weegee’s pictures of the famous custard pie fight featured in the film are among his least known photographs. They were also not his finest. Weegee was more suited to covering crime and the rich tapestry of life occurring in New York’s underbelly.

Weegee epitomised the cigar-chomping New York press photographer; ’staged’ was not in his photographic vocabulary. Instead, his voracious visual appetite encompassed the spectacle of all human life, including viscerally shocking instances of accidents, murders and the terrible tragic scenes that were the normal daily occurrences in the great and vibrant modern metropolis that was New York city. His images were searingly truthful and always fearless.

“When I really see the picture is when I’ve developed the film. Then I see what I’ve done. I really seem to be in a trance when I am taking the picture because there is so much drama taking place or that will take place. I mean, you just can’t hide it—go around wearing rose-coloured glasses. In other words we have beauty and we have ugliness. Everybody likes beauty, but there’s ugliness too.”

A photographer synonymous with 20th-century New York and its myriad denizens, Weegee made pictures that attest to the pulsing rhythms of his great city. His photography acted as a testimony to New York’s relentless state of metamorphosis, brimming with inherent possibility—life and death and everything in between.

Susan Sontag once stated that photographs have created a “chronic voyeuristic relationship” to the world around us. There is no better example of this critique than Weegee’s tabloid images of urban street life and crime scenes, all of which appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies.

His appetite for capturing this sometimes dangerous sense of promise is something he possessed in common with Metinides and Araki too, with a graphic sensitivity to the high stakes of city life, driving all three of the artists we are looking at here to an obsessive life of documenting what they were drawn to.

WEEGEE

Usher Fellig (Weegee’s birth name) became Arthur Fellig at the age of 10, when he landed in the USA via Ellis Island in 1910. He arrived from Zloczow, Poland (now part of Ukraine), having fled with his family from the waves of violent pogroms that swept in succession across the Pale of Settlement in 1903. However, it wasn’t until the 1930s that Fellig took to using an alias. He was a photographer so attuned to the goings-on in New York, that he seemed to intuit events before their unfolding. At times this gift of foresight bordered on the uncanny, seeming to draw on occult forces like a Ouija board. Hence, he gained his pseudonym: Weegee.

But it was less a matter of sorcery than of savvy that Weegee was able to capture these extraordinary moments. He learned at an early age that by tuning a small CB radio that he had had installed in his car to the frequencies used by the New York Police Department, he could catch ’the squeal’ (as NYPD crime alerts were known). This way he could be the first on the crime scene, often arriving well ahead of the police themselves. This knack for popping up at moments of unfolding crisis, seemingly guided by his unerring urban astuteness, led to his reputation as a photographer with powers of prophecy.

Weegee’s work was also sometimes used as evidence, since his pictures were often the first to be shot on site. They possessed an authenticity and authority in the eyes of the law, as the closest form of documentary recorded at the scene of crimes. He also well understood the art of creating a sensation through his pictures, and in many ways his images defined the type of visual matrix that picture editors came to look for in crime photography: just enough information to shock, but not so much as to offend—striking a balance like that is an art in itself. After taking the definitive shot, Weegee would process the sheets of film and also make prints in the boot of his car, and then deliver his prints straight to the newspaper picture desk—always stamped Weegee the Famous on the back. Hopefully, his photograph would be ’the one’ chosen by the editors on duty that night, so that he could collect his usage fee upon publication.

Weegee understood the world of newspapers, and what they were looking for in terms of photography. He responded by covering New York’s crime, accidents, fires, all things ’nightlife’ (Sammy’s on the Bowery was a favourite haunt of his) and the quotidian craziness of downtown with an almost religious devotion. New York was illuminated at night with an unrivalled energy and ebullience, and Weegee developed an unconventionally nocturnal schedule to hunt for source material. He prowled the city in his car, tuned in to the police radio, waiting for the next murder or arrest. Weegee rarely shot during the day, and New York provided the perfect shadowy backdrop, with deep shadows cast across the tough urban landscape lit by brash neon signs—it was the ultimate metropolis. Everything that happened, from the murders, to street parades, throughout the bars of the Bowery, and past fires, car crashes, and mob wars, were all his subjects for the taking. Weegee was the undisputed king of the night-time press corp.

His photographs were highly influential with filmmakers, who often tried to copy his style. In turn, Weegee himself was hugely influenced by the generation of European filmmakers who had fled to America, like Josef von Sternberg and George Cukor, to name but a few. The iconic film noir aesthetic was also made for him, and he fitted the part well. He operated at the centre of what was then the undisputed greatest metropolis in the world, deftly recording it with his Speed Graphic camera and the harsh blue flash bulbs that give his pictures their inflected sense of chiaroscuro. He would set his camera focus at 4-5 ft and the stop down to f.16, so that it was always ready to go and would reliably cover the scene, pulling everything into sharp relief. There was no traditional viewfinder on a Speed Graphic camera, and one had to work quickly to get the shot. There was no motor drive, no second chances. “When you go out on a story, you don’t go back for another sitting. You gotta get it in one.” Weegee’s work was best-of-breed, and it possessed its own visual language that is instantly recognisable as a Weegee image. He was not alone in working on crime and disaster in New York; of course there were others, but we don’t know them. Weegee was unique and injected his pictures with a dimension of idiosyncratic humour. The subjects of his photographs were often tragic, and there are moments of terror in many of his pictures, but he often found ways to allow the viewer to enter the scene without becoming immediately overwhelmed. He achieved this by positioning the camera at unusual angles, to establish a dynamic through which the photographs seem to jump from the page. He also used this technique to hide some of the more gruesome elements of certain scenes.

ENRIQUE METINIDES

This cannot be said for the second of the photographers whose work I have spent time with. My first meeting with Enrique Metinides was one of the strangest I think I have ever had. We were introduced in Mexico City by the documentary filmmaker Trish Ziff, who was making a film about Metinides and his extraordinary life. At last, Metinides had been forcibly retired—he did not want to stop working—and he was living in a small apartment, filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of small toys. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, rescue helicopters, miniature figurines of policemen, firefighters, doctors, and all manner of other rescue professionals. His home, littered with this cornucopia of ephemera relating to his life as a press photographer, was, on the one hand, amusing, but also strangely frightening and otherworldly. To “make fun” of the horrors was a somewhat alien concept to me but he explained that the more he saw, the more immune he became. His ability to do his job was paramount in his mind. Awards to this long and illustrious career covered his walls, some given to him before he had even turned 20. He was rightly proud of the success of his long and prolific career. He too, like Weegee, made pictures no one else could have made. His visual signature is clearly written over each and every one of them.

Metinides then invited me to lie down on his bed, which was surrounded by more remote controls than I had ever seen before, and which controlled the large bank of screens and video players to the right of the bed. I was invited to watch White Heat (1949), starring James Cagney. Metinides explained that it was this film that had been his guide as to how to compose a good action photograph. The angle, the light, and the lens were all carefully chosen to emulate what he was being taught as the way to cover the scenes that he found when he arrived at a disaster or murder. He showed me a medley of films of huge fires, accidents and arson. Metinides believed that spirits inhabited the voracious flames and each fire had a “character”, not all of which were bad. He pointed to fiery heads and flaming hands made from the licking flames that belched from burning buildings and cars.

He loved to alter the angle of his camera to suit the situation. If it was a street murder, he liked to shoot low to the ground, thereby exaggerating the trail of blood as it seeped towards the lens. Or he adopted a high viewpoint and stood back and away from the scene, to show the crowds of rubberneckers assembling to see the aftermath of a car crash or an aircraft nose-down in the ground. You could often spy an ice-cream salesman selling to the onlookers who had assembled in huge crowds to take in the pile-ups and accidents that seemed to be a daily occurance in Mexico City. His pictures thrived on the chaotic theatre of life that was the daily norm and which fed into Metinides’s hungry photographic appetite for all human drama

Metinides was a character like no other—he had started his photographic journalistic career at the age of 9, photographing his first burning building on the shoulders of an uncle who was a fireman. Later that day, his teacher demanded to know why the young Metinides  smelled of smoke when he finally arrived late at his school. He attended his first murder scene at the age of 12, and by the age of 13 in the late 1940s he was a fully fledged, self-taught press photographer working as an unpaid photographic assistant for La Prensa. The scenes he witnessed as a young boy were horrific and he saw dozens of dead bodies every week. An education that was to serve him well for some 60 years as a pressman. His ability to continue to witness the tragedies he saw would be beyond most people’s ability to absorb and to be able to sleep at night. He was a very relaxed man who never seemed to be phased by much, and he would calmly show me his pictures, relating each story to me in a monotone and matter-of-fact way. Nothing seemed to surprise him. He had seen it all— many times over—from air crashes to hold-ups, suicides, and even escaped lions from a car crash on a motorway.

His approach was vastly different to Weegee’s. Firstly, much of his output was shot during daylight hours, so the murky, gloomy dark urban backdrop was not his thing—although there were some nighttime pictures in his archive of unfortunates who had unsuccessfully tried to steal electricity, and the pictures showed the sparks flashing off the severed cables which bounced around the still, dead body on the street. Metinides’ most visceral and powerful photographs are often brightly lit by the hot Mexican sun, full of gruesome detail, and more often in full, bright technicolour, which runs against the grain of what one imagines a great crime or accident photograph should or could be. And as previously mentioned, Metinides, unlike Weegee, liked to position himself with his camera at a distance from the scene, thereby creating a vantage point that contextualised his pictures in a different way. He was very attracted to the ’crowd theatre’ that so often accompanied the moment of an accident or murder; the onlookers were just as important to him as the crash and the audience as good a subject as the poor miserable victims.

The photograph of the busy street with a dead infant’s mother carrying a small, pathetic white coffin under her arm—surrounded by businessmen in their dark suits clutching their briefcases, heading to lunch, and oblivious of the helpless distraught woman behind them—is gut-wrenchingly sad. But we have to look. So many of his pictures leave one with a feeling of helplessness, and his unwaveringly direct method of framing these tragedies must have also had a deeply disturbing effect on him—but he never showed it when talking about it to me.

One of his most famous images shows a dead journalist, Adela Legarreta Rivas, who had just been T-boned and killed by a car. She can be seen with her eyes still wide open, wedged between two telephone poles and in an almost religious pose. She is freshly made-up and her hair perfectly styled. The visual immediacy and the shocking brutality of the event is still apparent and so precisely cinematically captured.

Its styled appearance, like a fashion photograph, is very unsettling. It’s real. And it’s not a scene from the Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) which endeavoured to capture the beauty of horror. It is one of those photographs you don’t want to look at but you also can’t tear yourself away from. I have an incredible print of this image and I can’t really explain to even myself why I was compelled to buy it. As with so many others by Metinides in my collection, his art, if I can call it that, is a catalogue of death and suffering in all its random, often absurd everydayness. But it is also more than that. It is a catalogue of intrusion and it makes extreme voyeurs of us all.

Metinides illuminated a cornucopia of gore, murders, suicides, jumpers, accidental electrocutions, and even an exploding car by a petrol station. (In this particular image a petty thief drove off from the petrol pump with the hose still inside his car.) We feel somehow we shouldn’t gawk. But how can we not? We are only human, so we do. We stare at the mangled corpses and at the crowds who stare back into Metinides’s camera, which allows them in turn to stare at us. The cycle of voyeurism is complete. We react to these images with curiosity and the unease of identification. They aren’t war scenes. War photographers show agony to shock sympathetic viewers into action. The art critic John Berger once described this dynamic as the “discrepancy between what we see in these pictures and our own (more fortunate) condition.”

Should these terrible moments not remain private? Surely in death, we should allow the victim to preserve some privacy and a modicum of dignity? Death and also sex are both ostensibly private moments.

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI

The third and final photographer who I turn my attention to is someone who vehemently believes that all of this should absolutely be recorded in obsessive detail. Nobuyoshi Araki is someone who has kept an extraordinarily detailed visual diary of his life, recording the quotidian maelstrom of activity that surrounds him every day, whether he is in bed, on the street, or even in hospital. His obsessive documenting of his day-by-day journey through the complex and rich tapestry of Japan, in particular his home city of Tokyo, entrances me at every page of his work I see. And there are many pages to look at. Araki has published over 500 books during his compulsively prolific photographic career. Like Weegee and Metinides, it is hard to imagine what else he would do with his day if not raising a camera to document what he sees.

Araki developed his unique autobiographical mode of working with images that he termed ’I-Photography’ (or shi-shashin, in Japanese). This way of working was inspired by the ’I-novel’ (shi-shōsetsu) literary genre that was prevalent in the Japanese intellectual circles of the early 20th century. His photography documents his life and the lives of those around him, recording the details and private moments they share. Nothing is off limits to Araki as subject fodder for his camera, even documenting his wife’s deathbed in Winter Journey (1991) one of Araki’s most important series of photographs, which acts as the rejoinder to his seminal book Sentimental Journey (2017) which records his honeymoon.

This way of working has proven to be inspirational for subsequent generations of biographical photographers who use the medium to explore the beauty and strangeness of their own lives. He is the ultimate voyeur, and, after all, photography is the perfect voyeur’s medium, eschewing any sense of decorum. It might seem trite to claim that the complexity and profusion of an artist’s work reflects the multi-facetted chaos of life itself, but the body of photography that emerges from Araki’s obsession with documenting each and every aspect of his everyday life defies easy categorisation and often beggars belief.

I vividly remember being with him in London during his one-man show at the Barbican in 2005. Through his translator, he asked if he could be taken to photograph the Queen—and he was deadly serious. I suspect we would have seen and documented a very different Queen to the one Annie Leibovitz or Norman Parkinson gave us. He would have, I’m sure, shown her the respect she would have demanded, but he would have photographed her as a woman too—I so wish we could have found a way to make it happen. He wanted to photograph everything, and his camera never left his eye the whole time I was with him. He breathed the very essence of our great city through his lens, and saw so much more than I did. It was a visually exhausting few days.

Araki has boldly challenged many social mores and censorship imperatives that try to guide taste, preferring instead to adopt a more confrontational style that has served him well. His obsessive will to photograph and the 24/7 coverage of his every minute have ensured that very little has been left to the imagination. Whether it be scenes from the street, food, sex, bondage, the underbelly of Shinjuku in its 70s heyday, or simply his passionate and enduring love for his city, his images have garnered him local rock-star status—he can do no wrong. Even during the strict period of censorship which continued until the 1980s, during which his work was confiscated and defaced by the authorities, Araki continued to challenge, publishing his books in all their glory. He took on the authorities, scratching out the genitals himself, and turned the censorship into a unique and personal art form.

Araki’s shooting style is raw, but it is also very beautiful and displays an acute visual agility that elevates his subject matter beyond the normal. He shows us that any subject can be transformed into something exquisite that may also often be at times disturbing. Look at The Banquet (2021), his much celebrated book on food. If you don’t salivate at the same time as being repulsed, there is someone you need to speak to. His obsession with kinbaku, or bondage, is unsettling for many, but equally ravishing. One cannot deny its visual impact nor its strangeness, which I never cease to find attractive. This element of his output is not simply about the male gaze and I believe this work to be often very misunderstood. This theatre that Araki creates is similar to the early shunga engravings (the erotic art of the Edo period, 1603—1867) that he references: depravity and beauty combined into one complex, exquisite tableau. Araki understands this so well, being so expertly versed in the nature of the narrative style of manga. Having grown up surrounded by the people and the bustling Tokyo streets, he would continue to obsessively photograph what he knew every day. No one was too old or too young, too beautiful or too ordinary to fall under his spell. Araki, through his diligent and dramatic practice, has been able to create a brilliant, unequalled body of work over the past 65 years. On almost every page of his many books, the constant waves of imagery contained in his stream of visual consciousness confirms to me that we as individuals often miss, or pass off as banal, the small minutiae of life, which are the very things we should take notice of. He reminds us that everything forms part of the temporal architecture of daily existence—a complex and often confusing picture of life as the seconds tick by. And what makes photography the strange invention it is, is that its primary raw ingredients are simply light and time. But what a plethora of information and enjoyment we can take from these fundamental elements. Araki clearly understands this and resolutely refuses to allow these unique, small moments he illuminates through his lens to escape unrecorded and ultimately unpublished. The book is the thing in Japanese photography, not the wall.

I am convinced that the legacy each of these three giants has left us will be studied and commented on for many years hence. By stepping outside the normal confines of what can be or should be recorded, they have left us with many seminal moments in time that we are so drawn to. Human beings are, for the most-part, hugely consumptive voyeurs; and a camera, in the hands of such talented storytellers, is a perfect tool for producing stories for us to absorb. Regardless of the lack of traditional beauty or happy endings—we are captivated and drawn in by their eloquence like a moth to a flame. How can we not look, and be reminded always, that all in life is bittersweet?