The steel arch springs out of the ground and vaults up beyond the top edge of the frame, caught here in the middle of a leap it will never finish for the eye. Everything is bathed in a late gold that flatters the old stone facade on the left, ignites a single window in the brick fur-exchange building opposite, and hangs a thin white moon in the darkening blue. Such light seduces before one has decided whether to trust it.
The seduction is the point worth resisting and worth admitting. This is monument photography — Saarinen’s gateway, the corporate tower, the ornate cornice with its carved palmette — and monuments ask to be adored. Meyerowitz complicates the flattery by keeping the street below empty, the traffic lights cycling for no one, the sidewalk brick a cooling red. What might have been a civic postcard becomes something warier: a city holding its breath at the end of a day, grandeur and vacancy pressed into the same warm frame.
He made it with the eight-by-ten view camera, the instrument that let Cape Light slow American colour photography into contemplation, here trained on the hard geometry of downtown rather than the soft Atlantic. The large negative renders each register of the hour, from the blaze on the west-facing glass to the pale disc overhead, without exaggeration. Now an archival pigment print made later, it carries that graded dusk intact. His pictures belong to the Modern, the Met and the Boston MFA, where his describer’s instinct for light finds its proper company.
The steel arch springs out of the ground and vaults up beyond the top edge of the frame, caught here in the middle of a leap it will never finish for the eye. Everything is bathed in a late gold that flatters the old stone facade on the left, ignites a single window in the brick fur-exchange building opposite, and hangs a thin white moon in the darkening blue. Such light seduces before one has decided whether to trust it.
The seduction is the point worth resisting and worth admitting. This is monument photography — Saarinen’s gateway, the corporate tower, the ornate cornice with its carved palmette — and monuments ask to be adored. Meyerowitz complicates the flattery by keeping the street below empty, the traffic lights cycling for no one, the sidewalk brick a cooling red. What might have been a civic postcard becomes something warier: a city holding its breath at the end of a day, grandeur and vacancy pressed into the same warm frame.
He made it with the eight-by-ten view camera, the instrument that let Cape Light slow American colour photography into contemplation, here trained on the hard geometry of downtown rather than the soft Atlantic. The large negative renders each register of the hour, from the blaze on the west-facing glass to the pale disc overhead, without exaggeration. Now an archival pigment print made later, it carries that graded dusk intact. His pictures belong to the Modern, the Met and the Boston MFA, where his describer’s instinct for light finds its proper company.