Of crime and coiffure: Pair of exhibits shake assumptions

WHERE: Weegee at Photographic Center Northwest, 900 12th Ave., 206-720-7222.; BIG HAIR, little hair at The Pound Gallery, 1216 10th Ave., 206-323-0557

WHEN: Weegee through March 30; Mondays noon-9:30 p.m., Tuesdays-Sundays 9 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; BIG HAIR, little hair through March 31; Thursdays-Sundays, noon-4

In New York City, from 1935 to 1947, Arthur Felig (aka Weegee) was crime's chief chronicler, the night man whose blinding flash caught corpses before they hit the ground, crooks cowering behind their hands and pretty girls at disasters smiling, shyly, straight into his lens. He caught private moments in public spaces and turned them into stories that will live forever, or as close to forever as film allows.

To hear him tell it when he first hit it big, he didn't care about style, texture or the niceties of light exposure. He cared about recording the split-second emotional impact of a scene. From a couple kissing in a theater (the girl's toes curling in the urgency of her passion), to a young hustler freshly dead on the pavement, Weegee's images were electric.

By 1943, the Museum of Modern Art was buying him, but he wasn't buying it. You'd never catch him in art galleries or hear him arguing aesthetics in a bar. He was a street artist all the way, tabloid to his bones.

Weegee the famous didn't need the art world, which responded by falling all over him. Curators followed him around like puppies; the wealthy bowed and scraped.

By the 1950s, he took their praises seriously enough to produce what he conceived of as art, his crazy, fun-house distortions of celebrity faces. Marilyn Monroe became a rat, and Charlie Chaplin became his moustache.


	Arthur Felig (aka Weegee) captured the seamier side of big city life with his candid photographs, including "The Palace Theatre, New York."

Naturally, the art world dumped him. As a testy primitive, he was lots of fun, but as an artist who knows he's an artist, he had lost his chief calling card.

Half a century later, early triumph has overshadowed later disgrace. His street work glows unforgettably, and even his experimental distortions have re-emerged as important, if only because they prove how well he understood the meaning of fame in mass culture. When what people are famous for is lost in the greater fact that they're famous, fame is a leveler. It fractures identity instead of revealing it, hence the fractures in Weegee's faces.

The Photographic Center Northwest is presenting an excellent selection of Weegee's vintage black-and-white prints, from both early and late periods. The early work still offers the punch that endeared it to tabloid readers, but it also offers a highly romantic view of what has become a fictional world, grade-A prime noir.

"BIG HAIR, little hair" at The Pound Gallery takes an anthropological view of hairstyles, pitting Demi Raven's small oil portraits of spray and gel against Chris St. Pierre's small charcoal drawings of poverty and despair.

Take Raven first. His disco girls from the 1970s peep over the edges of his paintings like rising moons. They are shallow, but their hair is deep. Raven painted it tenderly, as if he were stroking the fur of an ailing pet. The girls can't quite get our attention, but their hair makes us pause, like some kind of subliminal billboard.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, are St. Pierre's drawings. They're about hair in the same way that Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" is about an insect.

He's drawing the soft-featured failures of the world, those who are not normally the focus of anyone's attention, except their own. Their faces are sunken, radiating defeat and exhaustion.

Yet they radiate something else as well, some hint, some glimpse or shadow of spirit, of the forgiving and all-embracing quality of grace.

Weegee created his own urban version of animal relish, and Raven puts his own stamp on the irony of the beautiful, but St. Pierre draws the marginal as if they mattered and sends us back into the world with our assumptions shaken.

P-I art critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattlepi.com.

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