“Weegee was a pest,” Helen Gee wrote in 1997. “Popping off flashguns in customers’ faces … handing out greasy name cards, rubber-stamped with his logo, Weegee the famous.”

Gee, the proprietor of Limelight, the first New York gallery devoted exclusively to photography, admired Weegee’s tabloid photojournalism from the 1930s and ’40s, but she had little use for him as an individual. (Among other things, he asked to photograph her daughter naked.) By the late 1950s, Weegee’s fame was fading, and he had become something of a pathetic character. When Gee finally offered to give him a show at Limelight, he wanted to put up pictures taken with a trick lens, instead of his famous crime shots. “These broads with five tits will be a sensation,” he insisted. “Nobody’s done anything like it.”

“Unknown Weegee,” which opens tomorrow at the International Center of Photography, presents more than 90 lesser-known vintage prints from the museum’s collection. Few of them are as arresting (a fraught word to use when discussing Weegee) as the best of the work he published in “Naked City,” his enormously successful book from 1945; the ones from the 1950s – shots of showgirls and Greenwich Village bohemians – show a sharp falling off in the photographer’s creative energy. But many of these pictures are worth seeing, and all are redolent of the decades in which they were taken.

Born in 1899 in Austrian Galicia, Arthur (Usher) Fellig began his photography career in New York in his early teens with a mail-order tintype camera: He took pictures on Sundays of children on a pony he rented. He worked part-time in the darkroom at the New York Times, and later toiled full-time in the darkroom at the Acme News Agency. Eventually he got to substitute for the Acme staff photographers when they didn’t want to work late nights, and in 1935 he left Acme to become a freelancer.

The tabloids that published his work over the next 10 years were the low end of the newspaper trade. They were read by workingmen and especially women, and had the prestige that checkout-counter celebrity magazines have today. In the reporting community, writers for tabloids were at the bottom of the pecking order, and photographers were beneath them.

Weegee’s genius lay in developing a style different enough from that of anonymous staff photographers to warrant attention. His ghetto born ambition drove him to create a persona – Weegee the Famous – comparable to his work. He claimed the name was a corruption of “Ouija” (a device used by mediums to tell the future), because he could tell in advance where incidents were going to happen. Just as some of his “serendipitous” photographs were staged, parts of his public character were suggested by the pulp fiction he read and the film noir he watched: the jazzy moniker, the cigar, the streetwise lingo, the tough-guy loner image.

Weegee was a tireless self-promoter. He succeed in branding his photos, marketing them and himself first to the proletarian masses, then to the Museum of Modern Art and other cultural elites. This aggressive, ill-cultured, limited man became an avatar of mid-century modernism, an icon if not a mensch.

“Girl Jumped Out of Car, and Was Killed, on Park Ave” (maybe 1940) is the sort of picture on which Weegee built his reputation. It is night. A body lies on the sidewalk covered with newspapers and a white sheet. A pocketbook poignantly lies next to the covered body. Weegee’s flash brilliantly illuminates the foreground and the body while the distance fades quickly into darkness. In the background, a man walks away with his hands clasped behind his back; a police car sits at the curb. The chiaroscuro and simplicity effectively point up the awfulness of the hidden woman’s death. Classic Weegee.

Many of the early pictures in the exhibition treat women sympathetically. “Mrs. Anna Sheehan … Accused as Murderess” (1937), for example. Mrs. Sheehan was tried for stabbing her husband, but the jury believed he “accidentally fell on a knife.” Around 40, she wears a dark coat with a bushy fur collar and a cloche that comes over one eye. The hat and coat frame her face, which is narrow and strong. Her expression is cool, with her mouth firm and her one visible eye fixed on the camera. There is a lot of story here we are not given, but Mrs. Sheehan is a person capable of drama.

“Mrs. Bernice Lythcott and Her 1-Year-Old Son Leonard Look Out a Window Through Which Hoodlums Threw Stones” (1943) is a picture of a handsome young black woman who has moved into an integrated apartment building. The hoodlums want her out. Weegee uses the hole in the broken glass to frame her stoic composure.

“Not Waiting for the Movie Theatre To Open … But a Refugee From a Fire … ” (c. 1944) is another young black woman holding a child. The picture gains pathos when you realize the garment the child is wrapped in is a man’s suit jacket. Whose jacket? Where is he? Weegee, himself an outsider, portrayed blacks neither with condescension nor false sentimentality: They were people whose situations he was interested in.

“At an East Side Murder” (c. 1943) reprises one of Weegee’s regular tropes, the crowd gathered at a crime scene. Here the three 9- or 10-year-old boys larking in front are the center of interest, while the teenagers and adults behind them form a variegated backdrop. Focusing on the reactions of passers-by gave tabloid readers the sense of how people like themselves were affected by disaster, but this example is not as good as Weegee’s best in this genre. There is a blandness to the people’s expressions, the composition, and the lighting.

Nor is there much charm or interest in “Woman in Greenwich Village Cafe” (c. 1956), a picture of a woman with short hair, maybe a lesbian, smoking with a cigarette holder. “Showgirl Backstage” (c. 1955) is a woman with heavy eye makeup in a black bra and G-string. “Bettie Page” (c. 1955) is an undistinguished picture of the distinguished pinup model. “The Gold Painted Stripper” (c. 1950) shows the woman in profile drinking from a tumbler. She is backstage and not as interesting visually as the man in the background holding two shopping bags and covering his face with his free hand so as not to have his picture taken.

Weegee prowling the city at night in his 1938 maroon-colored Chevy coupe with his Speed Graphic and flashbulbs was a formidable photographer. Weegee back from a stint in Hollywood in the late 1940s was not: It was a loss.

wmeyers@nysun.com

From June 9 until August 27 (1133 Sixth Avenue at 43rd Street, 212-857-0000). Also opening tomorrow at the ICP are “Atta Kim: On-Air,” “Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt,” and “Paris: Eugene Atget and Christopher Rauschenberg.”