Untitled [Children's Performance at the Palace Theatre]

“I guess all photographers want to be invisible. We want to photograph people as they are, and people are never quite themselves when they know there’s a camera around. About the closest a photographer can come to be invisible is to photograph in the dark, using infrared film and infrared light. This way your subjects can’t see you and they don’t know they’re being photographed because the infrared flash gives off only a very faint glow.”

—Weegee

Weegee spent most of the 1930s and 1940s photographing crime and poverty in Manhattan, and he earned his nickname by arriving at crime scenes only minutes after they were reported to police. Between 1943 and 1945, however, he began using infrared photography to photograph New Yorkers unawares in movie theaters throughout the city. About these pictures, Weegee said, “Here under the cover of darkness people find escape, privacy, and seclusion. Under the hypnotic spell of the screen, they are without their masks. They are themselves.”