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.

Week 2

After reading Kevin Lynch’s section, The City Image and Its Elements I wanted to break down Chicago within Lynch’s five elements or physical forms. Lynch lists these five elements as; paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Lynch describes paths as channels that people move along, and that most people observe the city as they travel along these paths. For me one path I observe the city from on almost a daily bases is Chicago Avenue from the bus that travels along this path. At the beginning of my path, I see small Ukrainian shops and bakeries, and a large chain grocery store. Within a few blocks, the view from my path changes to small Mexican restaurants and “western” clothing stores and occasionally a random contemporary trendy restaurant appears every so often looking oddly out of place. Then comes a bridge that goes over the Kennedy Expressway and that is my signal that it is almost time for me to get off this path and onto another one, the subway Blue line. This path is underground and so I cannot really observe the city in the same manner.

If I stay on my original path, which I do occasionally for numerous different reasons, my observations from my path clearly show that I am getting into a denser part of the city. A few more blocks on the bus and I see some sort of industrial site that looks not only to be decaying, but no one ever seems to be working there either. My view shifts immediately as the bus beginnings to cross over the Chicago River and there are numerous residential buildings lining the river that I imagine to be really nice inside and very expensive to live in. I am now in an area or neighborhood that is called River North. As the bus continues to travel east, I see a chunk of public housing and a community garden that both seem so out of place amongst the high-rise condominiums and upscale restaurants. I always wonder how long it will be before both are torn down, as it

seems like it is just matter time. The bus continues and passes under an L-train and I always think about how slow that particular train, the Brown line is, and how I hate when I have to take it. I see some red awnings for a Christian bookstore, which to me is a sign that I am getting close to the Red line subway stop. I see another red awning for a noodle shop and then at the next block a building for a restaurant painted completely red. If I am not paying attention during those few blocks I get confused when I look up and see where I am at since all three happen to be on the left side and red. Here is where I would get off and get on the Red Line subway, a change of path that would take me underground.

I find it interesting that Lynch starts with the path, as it really is the way we observe our city and find the other four elements he writes about. Edges are everywhere, but it is most obvious on my path when I am in River North and see a chunk of public housing that seems so out of place next to an arts district, high-rise condominiums, and upscale restaurants. Just in these few sentences, I described a district the third element of physical form that Lynch describes, River North. The description for River North under a tourism website for the city of Chicago Chicagotraveler.com describes the district “as a chic, cultural hub filled with art galleries, antique stores, boutiques and of course urban professionals. Boasting Chicago’s highest concentration of restaurants, this small neighborhood has become a favorite destination for locals and tourists alike. River North is aptly named; it lies north of the Loop, west of famed Michigan Avenue and south of Chicago Avenue, with the Chicago River as its boundary on the south and the west.” According to this websites, description of the district the public housing sits directly on the outer edge, as it is on the north

side of Chicago Avenue.

I mention a few nodes along my path that are particular to many others and me who travel this same route. The first node is the Blue Line subway stop along Chicago Avenue. It is not only a subway stop, but also a major intersection. Chicago is set up as grid with an occasional diagonal throughout the city, this happens to be a spot where two of them meet. This is a “node” Lynch is writing about, “they may be primarily

junctions, places of a break in transportation, crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another.” This particular spot in the city does all these things for many others and me. We shift from one structure to another, leaving the street we were traveling on and going underground to a subway. There is crossing over of multiple streets, many of which have their own buses running along them. Also right next to the node happens to be a major expressway that can take one in and out of the city.

The last of the elements that Lynch discusses is a landmark, usually a building of some sort of importance, or something that may be in the distance giving one a sense of direction. Traveling along Chicago Avenue that landmark is the John Hancock building, though I do not see it at every moment along my path when I do see it I know I am traveling east. When I first moved to the city of Chicago, that building was a

directional land marker for me, allowing me to understand where I was within the city.

It is clear how along our paths we observe the rest of the elements that Lynch writes about making up our mental image of the city. My landmark, the John Hancock building has become one of my favorite buildings in the city of Chicago, maybe because I see it almost everyday or that it guided me on my path when I first moved here, but it is always a comfort to me. This structure is dark, black, with antennas at the top and one of the largest buildings in the city, it does not sound comforting, but because it allows me to know my place within the city, as Lynch writes it allows for, “Structuring and identifying the environment”.

Lynch uses the term “way-finding” that he describes as having a mental image of the outside world and

memories of experiences that guide us and allow us to organize our surroundings. He mentions that there are “way-finding” devices that one could use along their way such as maps and route signs, but today devices to help us find our way are much more vast and popular, making it almost impossible to get lost. Before one goes somewhere, they can check Google maps, an iPhone, or GPS device, to not only get the directions, but the most efficient route, by check traffic or when the next bus or train is coming through a tracking device. These all alter our paths, although I described a common path I take everyday, I know that there are multiple paths that I could take and I check before I leave the house which will be the most efficient depending on the arrival of a bus or the flow of traffic. If a path is going to take much longer do to a late bus or heavy traffic, I will take different path. I wonder if this gives one the opportunity to learn a few different paths or if it takes away ones need to really observe their path as they travel, since there is the comfort of never getting lost with your handy way-finding device always with you.

Photographer Jay Wolke’s project along the divide, photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago not only show one of Chicago’s most prominent pathways in and out of the city, but also edges,

districts, nodes, and even landmarks. The Dan Ryan itself is seen as a landmark, but Wolke’s photographs seem to speak about the edge, how the expressway runs through “Chicago’s densely populated South Side neighborhoods.” The expressway is a very important pathway that many people travel every day and this is their way of observing the city.

In Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City, he writes, “ ‘The city,’ like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.” These interconnected properties could easily be Lynch’s five elements of physical form. De Certeau writes about the pedestrian speech act and its three characteristics, the present, the discrete, and the “phatic.” He writes then when a pedestrian utilizes the pathways set up for him/her in the city, the pedestrian invents ways that do not necessarily conform to the pathways intended purpose, for example when one creates a short cut through an alley, or crosses out side of the crosswalk. When I think of one maneuvering through a city in ways that it had not been intended to be navigated through, I think of the essay Lethal Theory written by Eyal Weizman where he writes about the Israeli Defense Forces’ inverse geometry. During battle soldiers moved through the city in “over-ground tunnels” by blasting through walls moving horizontally and through ceilings vertically. The soldiers did not travel through the normal pathways set up by some urban city plan of Nablus, they created a pathway that allowed the city to become the medium of warfare.