Before the sirens, before the first uniform arrived, a rumpled man with a cigar was already there, flashbulb popping. This episode traces the life of Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, from a childhood in the Brooklyn tenements and a darkroom job at a news picture agency to two years camped out at Manhattan police headquarters waiting for the teletype to ring.

The hosts break down the technical and editorial choices behind his gritty crime photography, separate the myths from the facts, and follow his unlikely pivot from tabloids to MoMA, Vogue, Hollywood, and a bizarre late career of distortion portraits and exploitation films.

• How Squeegee Boy became Weegee, and the 1938 permit that made him the first freelance photographer with a police-band radio in his car
• The locked-in setup: f/16, a fixed shutter speed, focus a ...