One morning in the midseventies, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a large model of a three-masted clipper ship sitting in the dusty window of a sailors’ club on Mulberry Street in New York City’s Little Italy. It reminded me of a model ship my brother and I had kept in our room when we were children — nothing special, but intricate like this one, with tiny portholes and little ropes along the decks. Thinking of my brother, I decided, for the sake of the past, to photograph the clipper ship. I attached a lens to my camera, but when I looked through my viewfinder, I realized that I’d inadvertently selected a wide-angle lens; if I didn’t switch to a normal lens, the photograph would include not only the ship, but two adjacent doorways and a dark stairway leading to a cellar. I started to unscrew the lens, but then had second thoughts. Looking again through the viewfinder, I discovered the image was full of unexpected intrigue: The ship seemed to radiate an odd, human, fabricated beauty amid the surrounding darkness of doorways. And the sunlight slanting down Mulberry Street filled the sails and touched gently upon the adjacent cement surfaces. The light was passing and would illuminate this side of the street for only a few more minutes. I took the picture.
When I returned home and printed the photograph, I was pleased. Instead of demanding my attention in a decisive manner, it offered a quiet mystery — nothing was given away. Somehow it seemed fraught with tension, like a flower growing in the crack of a busy sidewalk. And the more I looked at it, the more questions it raised. Why, for instance, was the ship propped so proudly in the window, like a sculpture? Was it a nostalgic reminder of nineteenth-century fortitude, or a melancholy emblem of sea-yearning. Whatever the real ship’s mysteries, it had now taken on the beguilements of a photograph; the brief morning sunlight that filled its white sails would last a hundred years.
A few years later, on a warm October morning, I spent a couple of hours at the Museum of Modern Art looking at Eugene Atget’s early-twentieth-century photographs of Paris. I’d admired his photographs for years, and found them moving, even astonishing. Equally astonishing was the fact that Atget hadn’t considered himself an artist; instead, he’d defined himself as a documentarian, recording for posterity what still remained of antiquated, preindustrial Paris. As I walked slowly through the exhibit, I wondered how these “documents” of a lost world had managed to slip away from their original intention and become what they were now. And what had they become? Art? Was it art that moved me when I looked at them, or something else? The photographs weren’t beautiful or polemical or even artful in an obvious way, and they possessed none of that thin, surface excitation that is the legacy of advertising; at first glance, they appeared to be plain, unselfconscious architectural documents. But as I looked closely, and then more closely still, I began to detect, in the secret heart of the wood and stone and plaster, an infusion of great human longing.
Leaving the museum, I decided to return to Mulberry Street. The fact was, I’d recently begun to envision a series of my own photographs in which the luminous three-masted clipper ship would present a stationary background to the passions of street life. I’d even imagined a lighthearted photograph in which the high-seas eloquence of the ship would serve as a foil to frazzled tourists in safari jackets. But when I arrived at Mulberry Street, I couldn’t locate the sailors’ club. For about half an hour I walked up and down the street, trying to get my bearings. Where had it gone? Had I misnamed the photograph? Had I taken it on Mott Street, one block east? But no, it wasn’t there either. Then, back on Mulberry, something familiar caught my eye — a stairway leading to a cellar — and I looked up into the large, sparkling window, filled with pastries and fruit and looping sausage strings, of a glossy new restaurant named Benito’s. In the dark interior, a bright brass espresso machine glowed above a bar. The lovely, old wooden piping around the window, once a flaking green, was now painted a bright new brown.
I went inside and asked a waiter what had happened to the sailors’ club that used to be there. He shrugged his shoulders.
This turn of events left me curiously lighthearted. I said goodbye to the Mulberry Street project and headed downtown toward TriBeCa, where I recalled a little cafe whose dingy front windows faced the Hudson River. Three years before, a dog running foolishly at twilight there had suggested a photograph never taken. Today, however, the cafe was gone. Across the street, a high-rise condominium, its ground floor occupied by a Safeway, blocked the view of the river. Even the people who had once lived in this dilapidated neighborhood — sculptors and dancers and men who worked in the nearby meatpacking plants — were gone. In their place were snappy guys wearing trench coats, and thin women leaning against sunny brick walls and eating pasta salad from styrofoam plates. For a moment I again wondered if I was on the wrong block.
A small section of the city had vanished, taking with it a few hundred nuances.
Standing there, an old Pentax around my neck, a camera bag on my shoulder, and a look of dumb surprise on my face, I felt as if everything I wanted to photograph were disappearing. What if Manhattan as I knew and loved it were to disappear? What if the politicians and the developers got together and, through tax hikes and rezoning, converted the entire city into something resembling this strip of expensive, unloved space? What if they evicted the old Yiddish-speakers from the Upper West Side? Or turned Times Square into a theme park? Surely the Trumps of the world didn’t give a damn about Ukrainian men playing backgammon in Tompkins Square.
Feeling dreary and a little paranoid, I started to walk south, knowing that when I got past the dull high-rise I would at least see the Hudson River. Rivers, even polluted ones, strike a deep chord, especially for someone standing on city pavement. (And the Hudson wasn’t just any river: a few miles north, where it wound its way through high green bluffs, Rip van Winkle had fallen asleep, and when he woke up, his dog had disappeared and his rifle had become an antique.) And there it was, across Eleventh Avenue — brackish and brown and pulsing and quick; and beyond it, New Jersey, flat and ugly in the sunlight.
Nothing Ansel Adams would photograph.
Turning back into the city, I headed for Tenth Street and Second Avenue, where I’d been staying with my friend Ken for a couple of weeks. The afternoon had turned hot and I was tired of concrete and the stink of exhaust and honking cabs and guys on bikes blowing whistles. I asked myself what I was doing in this city. Canal Street was jammed with cars and trucks on their way to the Holland Tunnel, and, as I picked my way across, I suddenly envied Ansel Adams: An old man on a high rock, tanned and vigorous, breathing clean, crystal air beneath the towering blue skies of Yosemite, gazing about at an eternal Eden. All the time in the world. Take an hour to set things up. The mountains would stick around. No developers in sight. No junkies. No dogshit. Compose, spiritually. Twenty thousand dollars a print. Heaven.
When I reached Little Italy I headed north and thought again of the model ship. Unlike the white pueblo churches Adams photographed — ancient structures in a permanent landscape — it had vanished overnight. Abracadabra. Compared to Adams’s images of waterfalls and valleys and churches carved in rock, my photograph seemed surprisingly ephemeral. The original three-masted clipper ship, upon which the model was based, had long since disappeared into history, along with windmills and stagecoaches. Now even its replica was gone, as were the old men whose seafaring passion the ship had represented. What remained was a black-and-white photograph, hanging on a wall somewhere. I thought: It’s not enough.
A few minutes later, resting on a bench in Washington Square, where in the sixties I had lingered with my summer friends listening to folk musicians, I smoked a cigarette and watched the local dealers, in black coats and sunglasses, hawking their wares. “Reds, yellows, blues, uppers, ganja, sunshine,” they muttered to passersby, eyes sliding off to the side.
Washington Square was a sort of intersection in my own historical landscape. My mother, when she was the young wife of a Village musician, had once pushed my brother in his baby carriage along these paths. (An old brownish photograph reveals a pretty young woman in a print dress sitting on a shady park bench and smiling at a toddler in shorts and suspenders with one hand on her knee.) A few yards from where I was sitting, Diane Arbus, whose disturbing images I admired, had taken some of her best photographs. For twenty years my grandmother had lived in the chocolate brown apartment building on the northwest corner of the square. From my bench I could see her three windows on the fifteenth floor, and I recalled how I used to gaze in wonder and worry at the circling life below. I could also see, high above the famous arch, the windows of Andre Kertesz’s twelfth-floor apartment. He’d taken wonderful photographs of Washington Square, in all kinds of weather — many of them from that balcony. I’d heard recently that he was frail and no longer able to walk through the city with his camera.
Across from me, an old man in a long winter coat and scarf, his hands perched on his knees, closed his eyes and turned his pale, dry face toward the sun. Perhaps he’d known my grandmother when she used to sit in the sunny sections of Washington Square and knit sweaters for her grandchildren. For twenty years she had come to the square; then one day she’d announced, “Everything has changed,” and had never gone back again. I thought of Atget’s Paris photographs at the Museum of Modern Art — pictures of a superannuated world. Had he, too, believed, as he made his solitary way through the streets of preindustrial Paris, that everything had changed? Though gutted buildings loomed ominously in a few photographs, Atget’s Paris hadn’t yet been invasively modernized; it was still a city full of dusty light and robust trees and little gardens and cobblestone courtyards and medieval ornamentation. And yet, Atget must have known that something was coming, and he must have known that this something would change everything. Atget’s photographs were, at their deepest level, a response to the modern condition of impermanence. Why else spend so much time compiling a visual record of all those timeworn things that would soon disappear, all the tender, specific beauties of an ancient city? Those little Parisian vistas that didn’t open up into any sort of grandeur; the chipped and faded paint on the wooden façade of a tavern, a row of wine bottles above three small curtains in the window; the tilting city shacks with cracked masonry; the patchwork skylines of unremarkable neighborhoods; wooden wagons parked at the end of cobblestone alleys; handcrafted stair railings. Atget must have known that if he didn’t hurry, if he didn’t hit the streets before dawn, Old Paris and its ancient neighborhood intimacies would be gone, along with the bric-a-brac dealers, the flower sellers, the fried-fish shops, and the small craftsmen. He must have heard the rushing of time, and it must have sounded like the beginning of a stampede.
I realized then that the curious depth of my clipper-ship photograph wasn’t simply the result of aesthetic effects; it also derived from a subtext of oblivion created by the onward rush of time — a rushing river behind and beyond the artificial moment of stillness that my photograph enforced. For the old, handcrafted sailing ship in the dusty window of a room tended by retired sailors had been doomed all along; I must have known it. The truth was, I’d been drawn and then compelled by its indefensible, fragile presence on a modern-day Manhattan street in need of another restaurant for tourists.
Moving on, across the square, heading for the East Side, I passed a young couple sitting on a bench. The woman, red-haired and pale, was dressed in paint-smeared jeans and a white T-shirt that read, “Picasso Sucks.” She was sitting upright on the edge of the bench, a forlorn look in her eyes, her mouth set in a grimace of pain. The thin young man beside her, wearing khakis torn at the knees and a T-shirt advertising a recent Pink Floyd tour, was trying his best to appear relaxed, his arms stretched languidly across the top of the bench, and his legs stuck out jauntily in front of him. Nonetheless, he was gazing intently at the woman, his expression full of tension and sadness.
Instantly I recognized the shape of a good photograph, and, slipping my camera bag off my shoulder, I sat down on a bench across from them. The woman flicked a glance at me and my camera bag, then returned to her troubles.
Intruding upon the privacy of strangers has always made me uncomfortable, and this time was no different. Even though I could visualize an arresting and even tender image (the light was right, the background uncluttered), I couldn’t bring myself to photograph this tableau of private unhappiness. Instead, I began to invent minidramas that might account for their misery: they were breaking up, here in the square, because he’d fallen in love with another woman; she was distraught because she’d found out he’d been cheating on her; she’d just discovered he had herpes. The woman sighed deeply and seemed to shudder. She turned toward the man, shook her head sadly, and stood up; without a word he stood up, too, and they walked away in silence. Slightly abashed, I wondered if my opportunistic, camera-laden presence hadn’t driven them off.
For reasons too murky to understand, I photographed the bench they’d just left.
Five minutes later, as I walked through the bright and flashy and feverish midafternoon crowds of lower Broadway, I wondered if there wasn’t a darker, less artistic reason I’d been drawn to the couple’s sorrow. Did I, perhaps, envy them — envy their obvious grief, their hurt and confusion? Unlike the young man and woman, I was living my life, perhaps for the first time, without passion — more importantly, without the risks of passion. Back in North Carolina, I was sharing a house with a woman I cared for, but our relationship was no longer vivid; an original spontaneity, both flamboyant and creative, had given way to reflexive gestures of affection. Was this unusual? Was it even wrong? For some reason, I was beginning to think so. In any case, as I stood at the corner of Eighth Street and Broadway (no more than ten feet from the spot where, two years earlier, I’d been hit by a car as I crossed against the light, daydreaming), it dawned on me that it wasn’t only the city that was disappearing, with its sweet dream of a metropolitan pluralism, but life itself, with all its tender and extravagant promises of love and possession.
As if in answer to this thought, within a moment I passed a building that looked vaguely familiar. Instead of a typical tenement stoop, two curving staircases mirrored each other’s rise to a second-floor landing where colorful used clothing hung on portable racks. In the midsixties this odd-looking building had been the Dom — the city’s first discothèque. There, one summer night, under strobe lights and a spinning mirror ball, my friend Alexandra Mitchell had taught me to frug. “Relax your hips!” she’d shouted to me over the shrieking music. And I’d shouted back through the din, “What the hell does that mean — relax my hips?” The Dom was now shrunk down to a clothing store selling paisley shirts and bell-bottoms and, yes, faded ruby red disco outfits. And Alexandra, my fine, gutsy pal, five years earlier had been murdered by her husband in New Orleans. Alexandra had vanished: time and forgetfulness had conspired to drop her into that Nowhere that admits no visitors. Yet I had a key: once or twice a year, I’d pull out the two photographs of Alexandra that I kept in a darkroom drawer — Alexandra mugging at Coney Island; Alexandra looking out her living-room window — and then, as if she’d just gone to the grocery to buy some beer, she’d return from the dead, a stream of bright, bitter water filling up a dry well.
Photographs console us in the face of death and oblivion. It’s their fundamental gift; they testify to what has been and what will be no more, and this testimony matters. It matters because oblivion is more than we can handle; because we get old and lose faith in the quick and competent gods of our childhood; because, unless we deny what our eyes see, or turn ourselves into machines, the future of everything is full of loss and disappearance; because we not only forget, but are also forgotten. Of course photographs matter. They remind us of that important time before the future fell upon us like a roof — when we were still handsome and lively, when our parents still loved each other and said so, and when our best friend, wearing a foolish red bandanna, hadn’t yet died. That’s why people standing on the lawn of their burning home, their children safe from harm, cry for their lost photographs.
To be a photographer is to be a connoisseur of vanishing acts.
Back at my friend’s apartment twenty minutes later, I opened a beer and gazed down into the street below. Across the way, an old man with a shiny, bald head sat on the steps of an apartment building drinking from a brown bag. Two kids skateboarded past him, shouting friendly obscenities at each other. I felt tired, as if I’d just returned from a trip, a journey that had begun a long time ago, when an unknown craftsman had built a model ship, which had somehow ended up in a Mulberry Street window. The journey had been one of gradual attenuation: a ship, with its immense physicality, had been transformed into a replica, a symbol, and then the replica had been reshaped into a photograph, a symbol of a symbol. Did this attenuation, this slow dematerializing of wood and sail and sunlight, serve a purpose? And what was the next step: a leap into words, into pure meaning?
As I watched the old man drink from his brown bag, I remembered the other model ship — the one my brother and I had kept in our bedroom when we were children. The funny thing was, my brother didn’t remember that childhood ship at all, though he liked my photograph; I gave him a copy and he hung it in his house. Now my brother was fighting cancer, and I didn’t know whether he would win the battle. Would he disappear, too, leaving behind only photographs? They wouldn’t be enough. Yet even the most bitter sorrow thins into melancholy if we are patient enough, or live long enough, while all photographs, given enough time, become important.
(My brother survived this first bout with cancer, but not his second, two years later. Since that time, sorrow has indeed been transformed into melancholy. Above my darkroom sink hang two photographs of my brother, both taken at a Braves game in Atlanta. In one he is laughing broadly at something I just said; in the other, a look of wry, boozy irritation tells me he’s getting fed up with having a camera in his face. These photographs, along with my family and friends, my books, and probably a couple of dozen other images, constitute whatever it is in this world that I call home.)
A girl with dark hair and stick-thin legs ran down the street and stopped in front of the old man. She waved her arms and chattered in Spanish, her voice as high as a bird’s. I started to reach for my telephoto lens, but changed my mind: the photograph wouldn’t capture the wild flare of beauty a child brings to a city street in late October. She leaned over and kissed the old man, and then ran down the street, shouting at the sky.
I sipped my beer and lit a cigarette and wondered if any of Atget’s Paris was still standing. Probably not. To the important people, the decision makers who design expressways that go through other people’s neighborhoods, Atget’s Paris was simply obsolete material standing in the way of progress. Forgetting the human cost, these high, important, distant people dream only of greater efficiency. It’s hard to stop them, but it can be done; it has to be done — just as children must be stopped from skimming emeralds across a pond. They demolished Penn Station, these “realists,” as if it were a gas station: that wonderful vestibule to the city, half aviary, half Roman bath. Yet when these same wallets wanted to take down Grand Central a couple of years later, for pretty much the same reasons, they were stopped in their tracks. The first loss had been too large to go unnoticed — and photographs, which constitute a large part of our collective memory, were part of the noticing. Well, I thought, standing above the shadowed street in the last lingering hour of that October day, there’s a lot to be noticed.
The pigeons, for instance. Every afternoon a flock of pigeons gathered on the roof across the street. They’d perch and flutter, and at sudden loud noises fly up in a whir of wings, only to resettle a few seconds later. Why did they live in the city, I wondered, if they couldn’t get used to it? You’d think they’d fly someplace where it was quiet and they could perch calmly. Just a few miles away were fields and meadows without the sounds of sirens or cars backfiring. Why didn’t they go there?
Feeling a little sleepy, I lay down on the sofa. Outside, I could hear the little girl with the high voice running up the street, shouting something; the sound of her sandals smacking the pavement, like the snap of bubble gum. Farther away, toward Second Avenue, I could hear two men arguing, then laughing. In an hour, when the sun began to sink over New Jersey, the city I loved would be blazing like a jewel.
This essay previously appeared in Five Points.
— Ed.
