Which of these faces is the living one? The blonde in the foreground, masked in black across the eyes, her lips a lacquered red, holds so still that I take her for a mannequin, and perhaps she is one. Behind the glass, two men are unmistakably alive: one drawing on a cigarette, his white sweater vest catching the amber arcade light; the other, younger, leaning his forearm on a blue cooler. The photograph sets the counterfeit face against the real ones and lets me hesitate.
What holds me is the reflection: the picture is layered, a chain-link fence and orange smears of light dissolving the boundary between inside and outside, so that the men seem submerged in the same amber water as the woman. And then the small red sign, DRINK Coca-Cola, ICE COLD, glowing at the lower right like a caption the scene did not ask for. It is the one thing in perfect focus, the one thing that speaks, and it speaks of thirst while everyone else keeps silent. I cannot stop returning to it.
That Meyerowitz made this in color, on the street, before color was thought serious, is part of its strangeness; he was among those who, with Shore and Eggleston, would make the medium respectable. Here he is still the descendant of Robert Frank, prowling Times Square at night. The archival pigment print, made later, keeps the warm murk intact, the golds and rusts of a Playland arcade. A photographer bound for MoMA and the Met, caught in the act of preferring a mannequin’s stare to our own.
Which of these faces is the living one? The blonde in the foreground, masked in black across the eyes, her lips a lacquered red, holds so still that I take her for a mannequin, and perhaps she is one. Behind the glass, two men are unmistakably alive: one drawing on a cigarette, his white sweater vest catching the amber arcade light; the other, younger, leaning his forearm on a blue cooler. The photograph sets the counterfeit face against the real ones and lets me hesitate.
What holds me is the reflection: the picture is layered, a chain-link fence and orange smears of light dissolving the boundary between inside and outside, so that the men seem submerged in the same amber water as the woman. And then the small red sign, DRINK Coca-Cola, ICE COLD, glowing at the lower right like a caption the scene did not ask for. It is the one thing in perfect focus, the one thing that speaks, and it speaks of thirst while everyone else keeps silent. I cannot stop returning to it.
That Meyerowitz made this in color, on the street, before color was thought serious, is part of its strangeness; he was among those who, with Shore and Eggleston, would make the medium respectable. Here he is still the descendant of Robert Frank, prowling Times Square at night. The archival pigment print, made later, keeps the warm murk intact, the golds and rusts of a Playland arcade. A photographer bound for MoMA and the Met, caught in the act of preferring a mannequin’s stare to our own.