A feast-day stall on a New York street at night, the San Genaro festival in 1950, is the ground on which Faurer assembles a small crowd of faces. Bare bulbs and the metal spokes of a ride or a wheel of prizes glitter across the top of the frame. Below, a counter heaped with bread, boxed goods, a man's hat, and a row of plaster figures runs the width of the picture, separating us from the people behind it.
The faces are arranged almost as a frieze. A boy at lower left, dark-jacketed, looks down and away; behind him a young man in profile; then two women's heads, one nearly hidden behind the other, both turned the same direction; and at the right an older woman in a flowered dress, her hair pulled back, holding a banknote, her gaze fixed elsewhere. No two people meet, and none looks at the camera. Faurer has caught a row of separate attentions standing shoulder to shoulder.
The festival lights promise gaiety, but the formal logic of the picture is one of isolation within proximity. The counter holds the figures at a fixed distance and stacks them in shallow depth, so the eye reads them as a sequence of solitudes. This was Faurer's recurring subject, the loneliness that the crowded, lit-up city sharpens rather than relieves, found here amid bread and plaster saints under the carnival bulbs.
A feast-day stall on a New York street at night, the San Genaro festival in 1950, is the ground on which Faurer assembles a small crowd of faces. Bare bulbs and the metal spokes of a ride or a wheel of prizes glitter across the top of the frame. Below, a counter heaped with bread, boxed goods, a man's hat, and a row of plaster figures runs the width of the picture, separating us from the people behind it.
The faces are arranged almost as a frieze. A boy at lower left, dark-jacketed, looks down and away; behind him a young man in profile; then two women's heads, one nearly hidden behind the other, both turned the same direction; and at the right an older woman in a flowered dress, her hair pulled back, holding a banknote, her gaze fixed elsewhere. No two people meet, and none looks at the camera. Faurer has caught a row of separate attentions standing shoulder to shoulder.
The festival lights promise gaiety, but the formal logic of the picture is one of isolation within proximity. The counter holds the figures at a fixed distance and stacks them in shallow depth, so the eye reads them as a sequence of solitudes. This was Faurer's recurring subject, the loneliness that the crowded, lit-up city sharpens rather than relieves, found here amid bread and plaster saints under the carnival bulbs.