Stieglitz turned this same Manhattan skyline into a hushed cathedral; Faurer drags the night picture back down into the street, into the body. Where an earlier generation framed Manhattan as architecture, here the towers are merely backlight, a grid of lit office windows hovering in haze above a raw plywood fence. The glamour has been demoted to scenery; the real subject loiters below, at curb level, where we live.
Faurer photographs the fence first, that pale band of new lumber slicing across the frame, and then the figures strung along it like a row of half-developed thoughts. They are mostly men in coats and brimmed hats, blurred at the edges, dissolving into their own shadows. One sits, hunched, foreground-close and faceless. Others cluster at the right, talking, going nowhere. Nobody looks up at the radiant skyline that would have been the whole point for anyone else.
What I love is the appetite in it, the way the soft 1947 grain makes the lit windows feel almost touchable, sweet as candy in a black box. Faurer wants the city as sensation, not symbol, and he gets it: the cold above, the warm clutter below, the loneliness threaded through a crowd that never quite coheres. It is a picture about wanting to be in the light and standing, instead, on the wrong side of the fence.
Stieglitz turned this same Manhattan skyline into a hushed cathedral; Faurer drags the night picture back down into the street, into the body. Where an earlier generation framed Manhattan as architecture, here the towers are merely backlight, a grid of lit office windows hovering in haze above a raw plywood fence. The glamour has been demoted to scenery; the real subject loiters below, at curb level, where we live.
Faurer photographs the fence first, that pale band of new lumber slicing across the frame, and then the figures strung along it like a row of half-developed thoughts. They are mostly men in coats and brimmed hats, blurred at the edges, dissolving into their own shadows. One sits, hunched, foreground-close and faceless. Others cluster at the right, talking, going nowhere. Nobody looks up at the radiant skyline that would have been the whole point for anyone else.
What I love is the appetite in it, the way the soft 1947 grain makes the lit windows feel almost touchable, sweet as candy in a black box. Faurer wants the city as sensation, not symbol, and he gets it: the cold above, the warm clutter below, the loneliness threaded through a crowd that never quite coheres. It is a picture about wanting to be in the light and standing, instead, on the wrong side of the fence.