Weegee: Murder is My Business presents the work of one of New York’s defining press photographers through material drawn from the International Center of Photography’s archives. Edited by Brian Wallis and published by Prestel in 2013, the book concentrates on the decade from 1935 to 1946, when Weegee—working with a Speed Graphic camera and a police-band radio—built a distinctive practice around crime scenes, victims, and perpetrators.

Its subject is not simply sensational news. Weegee’s stark black-and-white photographs were made for tabloids hungry for immediacy and shock, yet the book also attends to the human presence within those scenes. The resulting portrait is of a photographer who understood both the mechanics of news and the emotional geography of the city: its night streets, gangster culture, public spectacles, and private aftermaths. New York appears here as a noir environment, but one rendered through close observation rather than atmosphere alone.

The book’s structure is especially revealing. Conceived as a sequence of “dossiers,” it follows Weegee’s transformation from freelancer to self-styled photo-detective while examining his relationship with the tabloid press and the city’s darker corners. That approach gives the volume more than the status of an image archive: it places individual photographs within a working method, a media economy, and a historical experience of urban life.

For collectors, this 264-page English-language hardcover is valuable as a sustained account of Weegee’s practice rather than a loose selection of familiar crime images. Its archival basis, documentary focus, and dossier-like organization make it a considered entry point into the photographer’s career and into the uneasy boundary between evidence, spectacle, and humanity in twentieth-century photojournalism. The selected edition is the 2013 Prestel reprint, ISBN 9783791353135.