20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm / 30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm / 48 x 60 in / 121 × 152 cm / 60 x 75 in / 152.4 x 190.5 cm / Limited to a total umbrella edition of 25 prints across all sizes.
Hand-signed by artist, mounted, titled, editioned and print date in ink label affixed to mount verso
Edition sizes available:
20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm / 30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm / 48 x 60 in / 121 × 152 cm / 60 x 75 in / 152.4 x 190.5 cm
A photograph made in a snowstorm gives up most of what a photographer usually relies on. Distance goes soft, color drains toward white, and the city beyond fifty feet becomes a rumor. Meyerowitz seems to have understood this as an opportunity rather than a loss. He set his camera square to a Manhattan intersection and let the snow do to the far buildings and the elevated structure what it does to everything — reduce them to pale slabs and grain — while reserving the front of the picture for the few things still willing to declare themselves.
Chief among them is the cluster of traffic signals at dead center, yellow housings each wearing a thick cap of snow, mounted on a black pole that runs the full height of the frame. That pole is the picture's spine. The eye travels down it to a lamppost plastered with a pink flyer and a torn paper face, then out to a green-and-white delivery van idling at the curb and a second van waiting at the right edge. Everything assertive sits near the lens; everything uncertain recedes. The composition is built on that simple division, and it holds.
What the camera describes here is not an event but a condition — how saturated color behaves when the light is diffused and the air is full of falling snow. The cadmium of the signals survives; the green of the van survives; almost nothing else does. It is a small lesson in what photography can still hold onto when most of the visible world is being taken away, and it is the kind of patient looking that put Meyerowitz, with Eggleston and Shore, at the center of color photography's arrival on museum walls.
A photograph made in a snowstorm gives up most of what a photographer usually relies on. Distance goes soft, color drains toward white, and the city beyond fifty feet becomes a rumor. Meyerowitz seems to have understood this as an opportunity rather than a loss. He set his camera square to a Manhattan intersection and let the snow do to the far buildings and the elevated structure what it does to everything — reduce them to pale slabs and grain — while reserving the front of the picture for the few things still willing to declare themselves.
Chief among them is the cluster of traffic signals at dead center, yellow housings each wearing a thick cap of snow, mounted on a black pole that runs the full height of the frame. That pole is the picture's spine. The eye travels down it to a lamppost plastered with a pink flyer and a torn paper face, then out to a green-and-white delivery van idling at the curb and a second van waiting at the right edge. Everything assertive sits near the lens; everything uncertain recedes. The composition is built on that simple division, and it holds.
What the camera describes here is not an event but a condition — how saturated color behaves when the light is diffused and the air is full of falling snow. The cadmium of the signals survives; the green of the van survives; almost nothing else does. It is a small lesson in what photography can still hold onto when most of the visible world is being taken away, and it is the kind of patient looking that put Meyerowitz, with Eggleston and Shore, at the center of color photography's arrival on museum walls.