Set this beside the orderly street pictures of the period and it refuses their good manners. Where a Walker Evans would step back and square the storefronts, Faurer wades into the crush of parked cars on Orchard Street and lets their black flanks fill the lower half of the frame like a herd at rest. The chrome bumpers catch hard points of light; the curved roofs throw long greasy reflections of the neon behind them. Beyond the metal, smaller and softer, the market goes on: SILVERWARE, LADIES, a sign for Joseph Schwartz, figures in hats threading between awnings.
What interests me is the way the photograph stacks two New Yorks against each other. In the foreground, the new abundance of the automobile, heavy and gleaming and faintly absurd in its bulk. Behind it, the older immigrant Lower East Side of pushcart commerce, lit by storefront bulbs. Faurer does not editorialise. He simply finds the vantage, low and close, that makes the cars monumental and the crowd diminutive, and lets the contrast carry whatever feeling it carries.
This is a 1948 picture, and it belongs to a lineage that runs from the street photographers of the prewar years toward the looser, more nocturnal vision that Robert Frank would soon carry across the country. Faurer is already there, working at night, trusting available light and the long tonal scale that Kelton's later printing would honour. The reflections do most of the work, smearing the bright shop signs across the dark metal, so that the cars themselves become surfaces on which the market is dimly rewritten.
Set this beside the orderly street pictures of the period and it refuses their good manners. Where a Walker Evans would step back and square the storefronts, Faurer wades into the crush of parked cars on Orchard Street and lets their black flanks fill the lower half of the frame like a herd at rest. The chrome bumpers catch hard points of light; the curved roofs throw long greasy reflections of the neon behind them. Beyond the metal, smaller and softer, the market goes on: SILVERWARE, LADIES, a sign for Joseph Schwartz, figures in hats threading between awnings.
What interests me is the way the photograph stacks two New Yorks against each other. In the foreground, the new abundance of the automobile, heavy and gleaming and faintly absurd in its bulk. Behind it, the older immigrant Lower East Side of pushcart commerce, lit by storefront bulbs. Faurer does not editorialise. He simply finds the vantage, low and close, that makes the cars monumental and the crowd diminutive, and lets the contrast carry whatever feeling it carries.
This is a 1948 picture, and it belongs to a lineage that runs from the street photographers of the prewar years toward the looser, more nocturnal vision that Robert Frank would soon carry across the country. Faurer is already there, working at night, trusting available light and the long tonal scale that Kelton's later printing would honour. The reflections do most of the work, smearing the bright shop signs across the dark metal, so that the cars themselves become surfaces on which the market is dimly rewritten.