SCOTTY’S DRIVE-IN, the sign announces from its perch above the roofline, and beneath it a seafoam sedan holds the middle of the frame like a docked boat. Hooked to the driver’s door, a tray carries four tall milkshakes, capped with froth and lined up as neatly as organ pipes. The whole picture is organized around that little shelf of glasses; they sit at the exact centre, the brightest things in a bright afternoon, and everything else arranges itself around their small ceremony.
Inside the car the human content is casually withheld and casually given. A man in sunglasses fills the front seat; in back, a young couple lean close, half in shadow behind the glass. The photographer has taken a flat, side-on vantage, parallel to the car’s long chrome line, so the sedan becomes a stage and its windows a row of framed scenes. Palms, telephone poles and a distant motel sign stack up behind in the hazed Florida light, each kept firmly in its place.
Meyerowitz was among those who, with Shore and Eggleston, made colour a serious language in these years, working the street in Robert Frank’s spirit well before the view camera and Cape Light. Here colour is not decoration but structure, the mint of the car set against pale sky, the cream of the shakes against a dark interior, a lone red car parked far down the lot. Printed later as archival pigment, the hues stay dry and exact. It is an ordinary roadside transaction, seen clearly enough to turn permanent.
SCOTTY’S DRIVE-IN, the sign announces from its perch above the roofline, and beneath it a seafoam sedan holds the middle of the frame like a docked boat. Hooked to the driver’s door, a tray carries four tall milkshakes, capped with froth and lined up as neatly as organ pipes. The whole picture is organized around that little shelf of glasses; they sit at the exact centre, the brightest things in a bright afternoon, and everything else arranges itself around their small ceremony.
Inside the car the human content is casually withheld and casually given. A man in sunglasses fills the front seat; in back, a young couple lean close, half in shadow behind the glass. The photographer has taken a flat, side-on vantage, parallel to the car’s long chrome line, so the sedan becomes a stage and its windows a row of framed scenes. Palms, telephone poles and a distant motel sign stack up behind in the hazed Florida light, each kept firmly in its place.
Meyerowitz was among those who, with Shore and Eggleston, made colour a serious language in these years, working the street in Robert Frank’s spirit well before the view camera and Cape Light. Here colour is not decoration but structure, the mint of the car set against pale sky, the cream of the shakes against a dark interior, a lone red car parked far down the lot. Printed later as archival pigment, the hues stay dry and exact. It is an ordinary roadside transaction, seen clearly enough to turn permanent.