Joel Meyerowitz - Street Photography

Week 3

In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd the story starts with a man sitting in a coffee shop in London, peering into the street observing the crowds of people passing by. He observes the people passing by in masses and then he looks at them in relation to each other. The man in coffee shop observes details such as; figures, dress, air, gait, visage, and facial expressions. He observes that most people have a business like demeanor, seem satisfied, and walk with a purpose. The other group he acknowledges seems agitated and seem lonely just from the very denseness of the crowd around them. He admits he is not excited by either of these groups. He goes into further detail explaining that there are junior clerks, young gentlemen of class trying to keep up with the upper class by attempting to dress like the, but are slightly behind the times. The upper clerks that the junior clerks try to mimic dress with respectability, mostly, bald and always wear watches. Then there are the group of gentlemen that live by their wits, pick pockets, gamblers, street beggars, and so on. The man watching from the coffee shop gives key details as to how he can decipher one from another. He notices that as the night moved on the character of the crowd became harsher, and it is at this time that he notices an older man that he is so drawn to that he gets up from the coffee shop and follows him on to the street. He follows this man all night into the morning and then into the next evening. It is here that we realize that our man of the crowd is not our narrator but the man he is follow through the crowds, who is incapable of being alone. When reading Walter Benjamin’s writing on the flaneur, he claims the man in the crowd is antisocial and is better off among the crowd of a city because it is much easier to go unnoticed around so many people. Especially if he is a criminal, he must stay within the crowd among the masses, he is safe, but the moment he steps away from the crowd, he can be caught. There is mention by our narrator of Poe’s story that the man he is following may be a criminal, as he claims to see a dagger on him. The crowds of a city are not only best suited for the antisocial and the criminal, but the also the loveless as well. Benjamin’s analysis one of Charles Baudelaire’s poems Fleurs du mal, To a Passer-by, is that nobody knows anyone in the masses of the city, they will never meet, causing love to be stigmatized by the city. Benjamin claims that Baudelaire himself was a flaneur, a criminal hiding from his creditors within the city going from cafes and reading circles to many different homes at night to elude rent collectors. Baudelaire also hated Brussels because the lack of shop windows did not allow for strolling, rendering the streets unusable to him. In Poe’s The Man of the Crowd the description of the crowds, the different types of groups within the crowds, and the small details that the narrator uses to distinguish one type from another are photographic. The details Poe’s narrator describes would be difficult to see and remember just sitting in a coffee shop or following someone through a crowded city. For one example Poe writes about gamblers, “They wore every variety of dress, from that of the desperate thimble-rig bully, with velvet waistcoat, fancy neckerchief, gilt chains, and filigreed buttons, that of the scrupulously inornate clergyman.” The narrator of The Man of the Crowd would have been well suited to be a street photographer. There have been numerous street photographers through out history, with Henry Carter-Bresson pioneering the movement. Many others followed such as Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Roy Decarava, and Joel Meyerowitz. I thought of Roy Decarava’s darkly printed street photographs of Harlem when Poe describes the light from the gas-lamps as having, “threw over every thing a fitful and garish lustre.” Benjamin goes one further and says that the story is “like the X-ray picture of a detective story.” I came across this video of photographer Joel Meyerowitz talking about street photography, it’s a bit cheesy, but at about a minute in talking about making an interesting photograph on the street he says, “how do you disappear in the crowd so that nobody sees you.” He then goes on to say these are some of the things one needs to know to feel comfortable in a public place. I found this interesting that to feel comfortable in a public you need to know how to disappear in the crowd so no one sees you.