What are these men in straw cowboy hats studying, bunched at the corner under a ONE WAY sign, their backs to us in pressed western shirts and Wrangler jeans? The picture keeps their object of attention offstage and gives us instead the choreography of a look, a half-dozen brims tilted the same direction, one black hat among the pale ones. Every man here is dressed to a code, the snap shirts and tooled belts of a working West worn as fluently as any runway’s uniform.
Across the street the same West is painted on a wall: a shop for SADDLE GOODS and BELTS, and beside the lettering a mural of a Native American archer drawing his bow, kneeling, mid-aim. Two more men in white hats walk past him through hard noon light and sharp shadow. So the frame stacks its images of a region, the advertised Indian and the living cowboys, the sign and the styled body, each quoting the myth the other lives inside. It is a photograph about how a culture pictures itself and then dresses accordingly.
Meyerowitz was by now one of the artists making colour a serious language, though here he keeps to the descriptive black and white of his street beginnings, the eye Robert Frank had licensed. He would soon carry the same attention to American light into the view camera and Cape Light. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the sheet holds the glare of the Southwest and the crisp grain of the hats. His work belongs to the Modern, the Met and the Boston MFA, and this corner rewards the patient eye.
What are these men in straw cowboy hats studying, bunched at the corner under a ONE WAY sign, their backs to us in pressed western shirts and Wrangler jeans? The picture keeps their object of attention offstage and gives us instead the choreography of a look, a half-dozen brims tilted the same direction, one black hat among the pale ones. Every man here is dressed to a code, the snap shirts and tooled belts of a working West worn as fluently as any runway’s uniform.
Across the street the same West is painted on a wall: a shop for SADDLE GOODS and BELTS, and beside the lettering a mural of a Native American archer drawing his bow, kneeling, mid-aim. Two more men in white hats walk past him through hard noon light and sharp shadow. So the frame stacks its images of a region, the advertised Indian and the living cowboys, the sign and the styled body, each quoting the myth the other lives inside. It is a photograph about how a culture pictures itself and then dresses accordingly.
Meyerowitz was by now one of the artists making colour a serious language, though here he keeps to the descriptive black and white of his street beginnings, the eye Robert Frank had licensed. He would soon carry the same attention to American light into the view camera and Cape Light. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the sheet holds the glare of the Southwest and the crisp grain of the hats. His work belongs to the Modern, the Met and the Boston MFA, and this corner rewards the patient eye.