It is a late-1960s New York morning, and the old order and the new have stopped to appraise each other outside a bank. A uniformed policeman, ticket pad open in his gloved hands, bends toward a woman who sits absurdly low on a toy-sized scooter, goggles pushed up on her brow; beside them a man in a leather jacket lounges astride a full motorcycle, a helmet balanced on the tank. Between the miniature and the monumental machine, the law is filling out its little form.
What detains me is not the comedy of the tiny scooter but the crowd behind it: a bank of onlookers in overcoats and hats, a man in a fedora, an amused Black man leaning in, ranged along the wall of the Hanover Trust like a jury. Each face wears its own smile, the collective pleasure of witnessing someone else’s minor trouble. A split-window Volkswagen bus, that emblem of the era’s other tribe, waits between the parties. The whole street has become a theatre, and I cannot decide whom it is judging.
Meyerowitz shot this on the avenue in black and white, in the spirit of Robert Frank, before he turned to color and the view camera and became, with Shore and Eggleston, a serious colorist. The eye is already democratic, giving the ticket, the toy, the crowd and the bank equal weight. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the grays are supple, holding the dark uniform against the pale stone. A New York that no longer exists, kept alive by a photographer whose work now hangs in the Met.
It is a late-1960s New York morning, and the old order and the new have stopped to appraise each other outside a bank. A uniformed policeman, ticket pad open in his gloved hands, bends toward a woman who sits absurdly low on a toy-sized scooter, goggles pushed up on her brow; beside them a man in a leather jacket lounges astride a full motorcycle, a helmet balanced on the tank. Between the miniature and the monumental machine, the law is filling out its little form.
What detains me is not the comedy of the tiny scooter but the crowd behind it: a bank of onlookers in overcoats and hats, a man in a fedora, an amused Black man leaning in, ranged along the wall of the Hanover Trust like a jury. Each face wears its own smile, the collective pleasure of witnessing someone else’s minor trouble. A split-window Volkswagen bus, that emblem of the era’s other tribe, waits between the parties. The whole street has become a theatre, and I cannot decide whom it is judging.
Meyerowitz shot this on the avenue in black and white, in the spirit of Robert Frank, before he turned to color and the view camera and became, with Shore and Eggleston, a serious colorist. The eye is already democratic, giving the ticket, the toy, the crowd and the bank equal weight. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the grays are supple, holding the dark uniform against the pale stone. A New York that no longer exists, kept alive by a photographer whose work now hangs in the Met.