Photography, at its mid-nineteenth-century beginning, muscled in on painting one precinct at a time. Portraiture, of a solemn, straight-on sort, suggested itself immediately. Its hold-still composition, simple and traditional, met a mechanical necessity of the new art: early studio photographers, at the mercy of long-duration exposure, often steadied the backs of their subjects’ heads with clamps unseen by camera or viewer. Landscapes held still on their own if the wind didn’t blow, so Gustave Le Gray could become an automated Poussin, while Mathew Brady strained to click his way past Gilbert Stuart. History painting—crowded, violent, declamatory—had to postpone its photographic update until smaller cameras made picture-taking portable and fleet. But genre painting, with its casual assemblages of ordinary life, stood ready early on to be appropriated by the new medium.

In “Bystander” (Laurence King), a newly updated history of street photography, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz point out the genre’s early inclination toward “humble people as subjects.” Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard’s “Photographic Album for the Artist and the Amateur” (1851) and John Thomson’s “Street Life in London” (1877) put images of chimney sweeps and millers in front of well-off viewers who could regard them with curiosity and concern: “Unlettered, uncomplicated people were felt to preserve an otherwise lost capacity for sincerity for which modern artists and intellectuals yearned.” Early in the twentieth century, as photography’s documentary capacities turned reformist in the hands of Jacob Riis and Paul Strand, it was still, as Riis’s famous title showed, a matter of “the other half” being viewed by those perched far above.

Only when tabloid newspapers went into mass circulation after the First World War, Westerbeck and Meyerowitz argue, did those “humble people” become the audience as well as the subject matter. More than anyone else, it was Arthur Fellig, self-insistently known as Weegee the Famous, whose “photographs of the poor were made—at least, originally—for the poor themselves.” The New Yorkers Weegee photographed—especially those caught up in sudden calamities of crime and fire—obtained a kind of fame that lasted not fifteen minutes but more like fifteen hours, until the next morning’s edition swept away the previous afternoon’s.

“Shirtless Officers” (1941). Photograph by Weegee / ICP / Getty

For decades, Weegee has been collected as art, thus restoring some of the original other-half dynamic between viewer and image. Coffee-table books of his work abound: “Unknown Weegee” (2006), produced for an exhibition at the International Center of Photography, is the least hefty and best arranged; “Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935-1960” (1982) is the grittiest. These have recently been joined by “Extra! Weegee!” (Hirmer), which contains nearly four hundred photographs, alongside the original, often exuberant, captions affixed by Acme Newspictures, the agency through which Weegee sold them. But there has been no complete biography of the photographer. Now Christopher Bonanos’s “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” (Holt) has displaced a host of fragmentary recollections and the loudmouthed, unreliable memoir, “Weegee by Weegee,” published in 1961.

Usher Fellig was born into a family of Galician Jews in 1899. He became Arthur sometime after arriving on the Lower East Side, ten years later. According to Bonanos, his “sense of family” was so “minimal” that he miscounted his own siblings in that memoir. The Felligs joined the tenement dwellers who would soon constitute much of Arthur’s subject matter.

His coup de foudre came, he later recalled, before he left school, in the seventh grade: “I had had my picture taken by a street tintype photographer, and had been fascinated by the result. I think I was what you might call a ‘natural-born’ photographer, with hypo—the chemicals used in the darkroom—in my blood.” He acquired a mail-order tintype-making kit, and later got himself hired, at fifteen, to take pictures for insurance companies and mail-order catalogues. He bought a pony on which to pose street urchins whose parents were willing to pay for images that made their offspring look like little grandees. (The pony, which he named Hypo, ate too much and was repossessed.) During the early nineteen-twenties, Fellig worked in the darkrooms of the Times and Acme Newspictures, sleeping in the Acme offices when he couldn’t make his rent. He kept the agency’s photographers ahead of the competition by learning to develop pictures on the subway, just after they’d been shot. By 1925, Acme was letting him take photographs, albeit uncredited, of his own.

Bonanos describes the Speed Graphic camera—even now, still part of the Daily News logo—as being “tough as anything, built mostly from machined aluminum and steel.” It was the only press credential Fellig needed at murders and fires, where, after leaving Acme, in 1934, he continued to show up with a manic freelancing zeal. A couple of years later, he was living in a room at 5 Centre Market Place, with no hot water but with a handful of books, among them “Live Alone and Like It” and “The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult.” He decorated the place with his own published photographs—“like taxidermied heads on a hunter’s wall,” as Bonanos puts it. He got to the nighttime action so fast that he developed (and encouraged) a reputation for being psychic. Bonanos shows that Weegee’s success had more to do with persistence than with telepathy; a bell connected the photographer’s room to the Fire Department’s alarms, and he got permission to install a police radio in his ’38 Chevrolet. However much Weegee wanted people to believe that his professional moniker came from being recognized as a human Ouija board, it in fact derived from his early drudgery as a squeegee boy—a dryer of just developed prints—in the Times’ darkroom.

Bonanos, the city editor of New York magazine, stacks up the “nine dailies” that chronicled the metropolis between the two World Wars. The Times was “prim about bloodshed, more interested in Berlin than in Bensonhurst,” and the Herald-Tribune wanted photographers to show up for assignments wearing ties. Neither employed Weegee regularly, and although the tabloids ran on visuals, his real bread and butter came from the afternoon broadsheets, especially the Post, then full-sized and liberal but just as “lousy at making money” as it is today. The World-Telegram was the first to give Weegee the individual credit lines he was soon commanding from everyone else. Bonanos resurrects the inky roar of this world with a fine, nervy lip: Weegee’s murder pictures broke through not because of their “binary quality of life and death” or their “technical felicity . . . with angles and shadow play” but mostly because their sprawled, bleeding, well-hatted and finely shod gangsters made them “more fun” than all the others.