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How odd that Rudy Burckhardt and Weegee should have been wandering around New York taking pictures at the same time. Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968), the foulmouthed, disheveled sensationalist, learned how to use a camera while working in the darkroom at Acme Newspictures, and swamped the tabloids with dark pictures of New York City corpses and fires, and assorted categories of mayhem. Rudy Burckhardt (1914-99) came to New York in 1935 from his native Basel, Switzerland, with a $20,000 inheritance and a thorough grounding in the classic culture of Europe. His poised, sophisticated photographs calmly take the streets of New York apart like a Swiss clockmaker taking a watch apart to study the pieces, and then putting them together again to see it run. “New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937-40,” currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, displays an album with 67 pictures by the photographer interspersed with apposite poems by his friend Edwin Denby (1903-83). The Gotham we see in this handmade scrapbook could be on a different planet from the one depicted by Weegee.
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