The Papa of Paparazzi; Weegee's black-and-white images of a naked New York heralded the era of sensational photography.

Byline: Amber Haq

It was a cold, quiet night in New York, 1937. Weegee, the legendary photo-reporter, sat waiting outside police headquarters. Suddenly a cop car hurled up the street. The door swung open and a young, drunk pickpocket burst forth, dressed to the nines in women's clothing. Weegee jumped up. "Action!" he cried, pointing his Graflex Speed Graphic camera at the man. "Gimme a smile--I'm gonna make you a star!" The grinning transvestite raised his skirt. Flash! A tabloid sensation was born.

"Boy Arrested" is one of more than 200 photographs by Weegee currently on view at Paris's Musee Maillol (through Oct. 15). "Weegee--The Berinson Collection" records the rise of the first 20th-century paparazzo, who scoured New York City in search of candid photo opportunities. During the 1930s and '40s, his snapshots of gangster murders, scandals and citizen arrests garnished New York's tabloids and broadsheets. "Weegee brought media photography to a height," says Cynthia Young, assistant curator at New York's International Center of Photography, which owns more than 20,000 Weegee photos. "He was a master of flash photography of the noir genre." Indeed, Weegee inhabited New York's underworld at the time of the Great Depression, Prohibition and the gangster wars and was friend to cop and mobster alike. "The sidewalk was his beat," says Olivier Lorquin, director of the Musee Maillol and co-curator of the exhibition. "It's where he learned his trade."

Born Usher Fellig in 1899 in Ukraine, Weegee fled the pogroms with his family and settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side. At the age of 12, he left his impoverished home to become an assistant to a photographer who took pictures of children on ponies. In 1924, Weegee took a job with the Acme Newspictures agency as a darkroom technician. By 1935, he had worked his way up to photo-reporter.

Life was cheap, and so was death; on display is a check stub from a New York magazine paying Weegee $35 ...