Bodies. Dead ones. A relentless series of flat horizontals, splayed out: ungainly limbs poking out of stairwells, inert mouths kissing the sidewalk. Welcome to New York as envisaged by Arthur Fellig, who, as a freelance press photographer in the 1930s and 40s, chronicled the dramas of the city night: gang warfare, fires, accidents and, above all, murder. “Murder was my job,” he once said. It was a work he pursued obsessively, based in his car with its improvised darkroom in the trunk and short-wave radio tuned into the police frequency. His alacrity in responding to these callouts—he often beat even the detectives to the scene—earned him the nickname Weegee, from Ouija.

Photography was not just a job to Weegee. Each one of the 228 prints on display at the Musée Maillol's current exhibition evidences the photographer's engagement in crafting every shot. They have a static, film-still quality, more atmospheric than emotive, created by an unusual angle or focus, or a skewed perspective. This sense of reality staged is still more obvious in the incorporation of “found text” into some images, such as The Joy of Living (1942), in which a man lies dead under a cinema showing a film of that name.
Rather than being merely the backdrop to human drama, the city becomes a subject in its own right. Weegee prefigured the Pop Artists in his attention to adverts and street signs—in one picture the neon slogan “New York Is A Friendly Town” floats in the night sky. Indeed, darkness itself takes on a substantive presence in Weegee’s photography, distilling a vision of New York as a hard and lonely place, a view which is clarified most forcefully in New York, the town where seven and a half million people live together in solitude (1940s). A man faces the camera, squeezed into the far left of the shot, whilst at the opposite end a woman, her back turned to us, stares into the immense pitch black of a park at night. It was Weegee’s talent to confront such moral and physical vacuums and frame them on his own terms, creating significance where there was none.

Until October 15. €6-8. Closed Tuesday. Musée Maillol, 61, rue de Grenelle, Paris 7. Mº Rue de Bac. 01 42 22 59 58. www.museemaillol.com