Smooth pale gabardine, the nap of a man's summer trousers, fills the right half of the frame and catches the light along each crease and pleat. Against it the dark wool of a woman's coat and skirt absorbs everything, a near-black void on the left. Between these two textures, at the exact seam where bright cloth meets dark, two hands meet. Faurer has cropped the couple to the waist, so that we are given garments and a single clasped gesture and nothing of their faces.
The man's hand reaches across and closes over the woman's, which holds a small white packet, crumpled and bright, perhaps a paper cup or a folded card. His thumb and fingers wrap hers; her hand is the one being covered. The whole transaction occupies a few square inches near the center, and Faurer's framing makes it the only event in a field otherwise given over to fabric. Below, at the bottom edge, a woman's shoe and a man's cuffed trouser-leg report that these two are standing close in a crowd.
Naming it a Freudian hand clasp, Faurer invites the reading the title proposes, but the photograph is more reticent than the joke. Withholding the faces forces all the drama into pressure and contact, into who holds and who is held. It is a New York picture of 1948 about proximity without disclosure, the kind of closeness the street manufactures and then declines to explain.
Smooth pale gabardine, the nap of a man's summer trousers, fills the right half of the frame and catches the light along each crease and pleat. Against it the dark wool of a woman's coat and skirt absorbs everything, a near-black void on the left. Between these two textures, at the exact seam where bright cloth meets dark, two hands meet. Faurer has cropped the couple to the waist, so that we are given garments and a single clasped gesture and nothing of their faces.
The man's hand reaches across and closes over the woman's, which holds a small white packet, crumpled and bright, perhaps a paper cup or a folded card. His thumb and fingers wrap hers; her hand is the one being covered. The whole transaction occupies a few square inches near the center, and Faurer's framing makes it the only event in a field otherwise given over to fabric. Below, at the bottom edge, a woman's shoe and a man's cuffed trouser-leg report that these two are standing close in a crowd.
Naming it a Freudian hand clasp, Faurer invites the reading the title proposes, but the photograph is more reticent than the joke. Withholding the faces forces all the drama into pressure and contact, into who holds and who is held. It is a New York picture of 1948 about proximity without disclosure, the kind of closeness the street manufactures and then declines to explain.