The poet of New York's squalor

The raw power of his 'scene of the crime' photographs brought Weegee the art world's acclaim - which was the worst thing that could have happened.

A walk through an exhibition of photographs by Weegee is like a promenade through an exceptionally lively morgue. Here are images - some of the most ghastly you are likely to see anywhere outside war reportage - of the dead bodies of gangsters, face down in spreading puddles of blood; of the carbonised corpses of truck drivers, trapped at the wheel and burned alive; of the mangled forms of car crash victims splayed out next to the wreckage of their vehicles; of hapless citizens who have drowned, or been killed in tenement block fires, or hurled themselves from high buildings at five in the morning. More tea, vicar?

"Weegee" was the professional name adopted by Arthur (né Usher) Fellig in the 1930s, when the young Austrian immigrant left his secure $50-a-week job in the labs of Acme Newspictures to try his hand as a freelance photographer. There are at least three accounts of how he came by the name, the most colourful being that "Weegee" was a phonetic Brooklynese version of "Ouija", and thus a boast about Fellig's almost psychic ability to turn up at the scene of a killing before any of his competitors. (It helped that the police let him tune his car radio to their frequency.) What none of these yarns points out is the grim aptness of the name: a ouija board puts you in touch with the spirits of the dead, and a Weegee photograph thrusts dead people in your face.

Weegee captured these lurid monochrome snaps on his nocturnal prowls through New York, and grew rich and famous by selling them to newspapers, who recognised that it's hard to lose money by overestimating the morbidity of the public. Before long, he was taken up by the intelligentsia, given exhibitions in swank galleries and hailed as a primitive artist of exceptional powers - an "uncouth genius", as one early assessment was titled. He also became (and energetically promoted his status as) a mythical character - an exemplar of the photographer as modern hero.

In other words, if Weegee hadn't existed, Hollywood would almost certainly have had to invent him; and, distressingly memorable as his violent images are, the tough-romantic image of Weegee himself manages to upstage them all. A handful of self-portraits in the gripping new Weegee show at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art - the fullest account of his career ever shown in Britain - sum up the legend better than any blurb could.

In one, captioned "Leaving at Midnight from Police Headquarters on my Strange Mission", Weegee shows himself at the wheel of his car, melodramatically lit from below. Through the left-hand side of the windscreen you can see his trademark box camera and flash, sitting up like an attentive passenger. On the right, chomping his inevitable cheap cigar, the pudgy and faintly insolent face of the photographer, about to swoop on the freshly dead like a proletarian Valkyrie. The photograph is a shameless, calculated brag, yet it's hard not to respond to its dark glamour.

In another picture, captioned "My Headquarters", Weegee depicts himself slumped, fully dressed, on a low mattress in a comfortless flophouse room decorated only by ripped-out pages of his own newspaper work and an inexplicable scroll of Chinese ideograms. It's the room of a man with no family, no friends, nothing in life except his Strange Mission - the room, in fact, of the sort of lonely existential loser-hero found in the cheap movie thrillers the United States began to make a few years later, to the delight of French critics, who christened them films noirs.

The cinematic atmosphere is no fluke. Weegee's first book, Naked City (1945), was optioned by Universal, and inspired the film of the same name by Jules Dassin; Weegee was launched on a new phase of his career. But this obvious affinity with the world of film noir isn't the only reason why Weegee's work can look familiar even to newcomers. The more general basis for the shocks of recognition in Weegee's photography is that it both drew on, and gave a particular spin to, a widespread form of 20th century urban sensibility that sees poetry in squalor, fascination in ugliness, and lyricism in the desolate and the uncanny in everyday life.

A handy name for that sensibility is "surrealist": not the slick, money-grubbing mysteries of Salvador Dali (of whom Weegee made a dull portrait study in his regrettably arty "distortion" style), but the authentic, original kind practised by André Breton, Paul Eluard and company when they cruised around the Parisian streets, treating the city as a gargantuan cabinet of curiosities. Weegee did, in fact, make a number of pictures that were self-consciously "surrealist" in inspiration, and they're pretty thin gruel: giant inflatable figures of Santa Claus and the like, moored before a parade, or a poster asking, in more than faintly white supremacist tones, for donors to a sperm bank.

Weegee's best work is quite different: surrealist in a far more intuitive and spontaneous manner. A grinning bagel salesman walking out of the night into the halo of Weegee's flash; a parked car covered in snow, somehow reminiscent of a squatting elephant; a drunken toff slumming it in a Bowery bar, caressing an insouciant pig; or a simple picture of the white line down the middle of a road, rapidly lost in the darkness - Weegee's subtlest memento mori.

The eye that noticed all those things didn't need any French lessons in the pursuit of the miraculous, and when you see them as thoroughly represented as they are in the Oxford show - mounted with admirable thoughtfulness and clarity - it seems less implausible that the cigar-chomping New York ghoul has been so cheerfully admitted into the photographic canon.

Passing from room to room, you can see all the family resemblances to other key photographers. There are the pictures of the homeless and slum-dwellers, which make Weegee an inheritor of the social concern of Jacob A Riis, whose How the Other Half Lives (1890) used the novel invention of the flash gun to lay bare the vile conditions of New York tenement life at the end of the 19th century.

There are the glimpses of boozed-up sessions in the Lower East Side, which make him a spiritual cousin of Brassai, the poet of Parisian nightlife in its riper manifestations; and there are the portraits of transvestites, transsexuals and costumed midgets, which make him a precursor to Diane Arbus, the deadpan collector of freaks and social casualties.

And then, upstairs, carefully segregated and signposted as "disturbing", is Weegee's private morgue. Though any number of photographers have depicted the dead, these shots are harder to fit into the usual family trees, and some viewers will surely recoil from the suggestion that they have any place in an art gallery. I'll readily confess to a certain queasiness myself, both for the obvious reasons and for a less immediately apparent one: however much it may have tickled and profited Weegee to be taken as an artist, it seems to have done him no good at all to start considering himself one.

On the evidence of this show, the bulk of Weegee's most distinctive work was done before 1945 - roughly the time when he was first lionised and hit the cocktail-party circuit. After this came society and showbiz portraits of variable quality, and ventures into avant-garde movie-making filled with facile ironies and mainly interesting as symptoms of a man who has lost his way.

Did Weegee fall into trite artiness, or was he pushed? In either case, the scene of the death of Weegee's talent appears to have been the art world, and you can't help leaving the MOMA exhibition with the uneasy sense of being some sort of accessory after the fact.

Weegee continues at the Museum of Modern Art, 30 Pembroke Street Oxford until 2 July