A night at the opera: Weegee's wartime snapshot was widely seen as social criticism, but it was, in fact, a farce.(INDELIBLE IMAGES; photojournalist Arthur Fellig)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-NOV-05

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THE CAMERA DOESN'T LIE, people used to say, before they knew better. Arthur Fellig, the Austrian-born photojournalist who clawed his way to New York notoriety in the 1930s and '40s under the name Weegee, liked to dispense that bunkum too. "A photograph is a page from life," he wrote in Naked City (1945), an anthology of his newspaper work, "and that being the case, it must be real."

Well, here are some facts behind The Critic, shot on the opening night of the opera season, November 22, 1943, and first published in Life magazine and now on view in an exhibition of Weegee's work at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. "The Metropolitan 'first night' in the second year of the Second World War had more...

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