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 at 10 feet, and why those constraints freed him to concentrate on composition
• The car-trunk darkroom myth and the misattributed phrase f/8 and be there
• Names make news: the staged 1943 photograph The Critic outside the Metropolitan Opera
• Naked City, the Dr. Strangelove connection with Peter Sellers, and Wilma Wilcox’s donation of 16,000 photographs to the International Center of Photography