Every photograph of men together is also a photograph of a hierarchy. Four of them stand around the open door of a cab, New York, 1950, in dark coats and felt hats, the night behind them dissolved into a long smear of neon — letters, bulbs, reflections running liquid down the wet glass of the taxi. One man, hatted, holds court at the left, mouth open in speech; another, hatless under the brim's shadow, listens with a cigarette burning at his lip; two more, backs and brims toward us, close the circle. The cab door, swung wide, frames them like a proscenium.
The image is built of brims. Four hats describe an arc, a small parliament of felt, and within it the faces negotiate — who speaks, who waits, who is being received into the car and who remains on the curb. The taxi's pale flank carries a faint stencilled lettering, a ghost of commerce; the window holds the smeared lamps of the avenue, so that the city itself appears as reflection, secondhand, behind the men's transaction. They are the lit subject; the metropolis is merely their backdrop, blurred to applause.
What detains me is the white carnation at one lapel — a small bright wound of formality in all that dark wool, a boutonnière that says occasion, evening, perhaps celebration. It is the single soft, civilian thing among the hard brims and the hard glare. Faurer, who loved the night people of Times Square, lets these four conduct their obscure business and grants me only that flower as a way in: proof that beneath the conspiratorial hats stood a man who had dressed, that evening, to be seen.
Every photograph of men together is also a photograph of a hierarchy. Four of them stand around the open door of a cab, New York, 1950, in dark coats and felt hats, the night behind them dissolved into a long smear of neon — letters, bulbs, reflections running liquid down the wet glass of the taxi. One man, hatted, holds court at the left, mouth open in speech; another, hatless under the brim's shadow, listens with a cigarette burning at his lip; two more, backs and brims toward us, close the circle. The cab door, swung wide, frames them like a proscenium.
The image is built of brims. Four hats describe an arc, a small parliament of felt, and within it the faces negotiate — who speaks, who waits, who is being received into the car and who remains on the curb. The taxi's pale flank carries a faint stencilled lettering, a ghost of commerce; the window holds the smeared lamps of the avenue, so that the city itself appears as reflection, secondhand, behind the men's transaction. They are the lit subject; the metropolis is merely their backdrop, blurred to applause.
What detains me is the white carnation at one lapel — a small bright wound of formality in all that dark wool, a boutonnière that says occasion, evening, perhaps celebration. It is the single soft, civilian thing among the hard brims and the hard glare. Faurer, who loved the night people of Times Square, lets these four conduct their obscure business and grants me only that flower as a way in: proof that beneath the conspiratorial hats stood a man who had dressed, that evening, to be seen.