Lot 561 D

As background to this portrait of an abandoned baby, Weegee ‘The Famous’ - who documented crime and catastrophe of the New York nights in the 1930s and 1940s – wrote in his autobiographical memoirs: “The first thing the cops did was inform all the newspapers. They wanted pictures of the child to be released so that when the mother saw the picture in the newspaper, she would feel remorse and take the child back. The first time I had such a case, I went to the hospital where the child had been taken and was fitted with a white gown and a mask. The child was only a few days old and was smiling. I was just about to take a smiling picture when the nurse asked me how long I had been reporting on abandoned children. I told her it was my first time. She approached the baby and pricked it with a needle. It howled and started crying. ‘Now you can take a photo’, said the nurse. ‘That will bring the mother back’. And so it did.” (Quoted in: Weegee's New York. 335 Photographien 1953 - 1960, Munich i.a. 1996, p. 25).