By 1940, when he took this picture, the photographer Arthur Fellig – better known as Weegee – was infamous for his brutally candid closeups of New York’s underworld: gangsters and late-night car-wrecks, murderers and victims. “Being a freelance photographer was not the easiest way to make a living,” he once recalled, “there had to be a good meaty story to get the editors to buy the pictures… a tenement house fire, with the screaming people being carried down the aerial ladder clutching their babies, dogs, cats, canaries, parrots, monkeys… a just-shot gangster, lying in the gutter, well dressed in his dark suit and pearl grey hat, hot off the griddle, with a priest, who seemed to appear from nowhere, giving him the last rites.”
When he wasn’t shooting front-page news, Weegee was dispatched to find surreal moments in the city’s life. Here, the body laid out for Weegee’s camera is the inflatable Santa that was the headline act of Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Weegee pitched up in the early morning to catch the balloon being brought to life with 8,000 cubic metres of helium gas. It might seem, however, that he brought his true vocation to bear on the scene. It turned out that Weegee was a witness to Santa’s last hurrah.
Since 1928, the 14-metre (45ft) balloon, designed by the illustrator and puppeteer Tony Sarg, had led the parade to the department store, hovering above a dressed-up Father Christmas who proceeded to scale Macy’s shopfront and take up residence for the season in the Christmas grotto. The year after this picture was taken a crowd of 50,000 people watched Santa spring a leak and deflate in front of them. Sarg’s rubber creation was subsequently donated to the war effort, along with the rest of the Macy’s inflatables, to be melted down for use in tanks and planes.
