CONCLUSIONS AND INCONCLUSIONS (8/08/08)

In early August I found that Julio, the shoeshine man from Guatemala, had been told to move from his position outside the seldom-used Palace Theater, where I had seen him for nearly two years. He was stationed a few blocks south, looking like a fish out of water. I remembered a sunny Saturday morning weeks earlier  when I had found the Palace doors open, and against Julio’s protestations, went inside to look around. When I came out he berated me angrily, in his self-appointed role as security man for the historic theater. Now they were renovating, and he was brushed aside. “Pinche police,” he snarled, even as he seemed grateful for my concern. As fleeting and insignificant as this moment seems, it speaks to the true nature of my work on Broadway St. More than anything, it’s about the people.

One of the key questions in any medium is how do you know when you’re finished? In this sense, a long-term documentary project like this is different from an oil painting, marble sculpture or any studio endeavor in one important way. Street photography, in my way of thinking, is a Public Art, an inherently social and physical act. There’s no logical breaking-off point, save for exhaustion or boredom (and digital technology eliminates the cost of film and processing). The gentrification of the Historic Theater District is an event of urban planning akin to social Darwinism, and it may take ten years before the entire face of the area has reached its idyllic conclusion. Even then, it will still retain some of the current flavor: “If they change, we too will change,” the owner of one of the retail clothing shops told me confidently. He has become accustomed to my visits, occasionally shuffling through the large pile of prints I carry, expressing his appreciation of black and white photography while pointing out where I might find some of the people in the pictures.

It's all about the people.

But finish I must, at least with regard to the MFA degree. At some point, a member of my thesis committee warned me, too many portraits of shopkeepers, or images of old signs and buildings would become redundant. Here’s another point of artistic liberation—as a photojournalist, that stopping point would make itself known as the narrative reached a satisfactory conclusion. Not so clear-cut for the self-expressive act. At the time of this writing, though I’ve averaged one visit per week for several months (each visit producing anywhere from 15-30 photographs I consider viable) I’m not finished. My familiarity with the environment and people has increased, and my appetite for seeking telling images has yet to diminish. I still feel the same rush of adrenaline each time I emerge from the subway station near the corner of 5^th and Broadway, and a mixture of awe, anticipation and fear as I blend into the slipstream of life, always the same, but always different. With each visit I understand more what Winogrand felt, that there are endless opportunities for interesting photographs. In this sense, I’m really not that much different than the hordes posting their images on the Internet.

            Yes, I like to look. I can admit it now! 

I was planning to end this by paraphrasing several quotes on voyeurism and scopophilia, with the intention of underlining my alliance with the premise that this kind of work is essentially about class consciousness, and that photographic documentarians (artists with cameras) are “supertourists,” free to return to their cushy lairs once they have satisfied their various curiosities. But it’s all been said before, most profoundly and bluntly by James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As it turns out, one juicy quote from Paula Rabinowitz (Google her if you’re not completely turned off by a Marxist-Feminist argument as an abrupt ending):

 “Voyeurism and its attendant sadism is at the heart of the documentary narrative, which depends on the power of the gaze to construct meanings for the writer and the reader of ‘the people.’ Furthermore, the two terms—documentary, narrative—remain at odds with each other. Insisting on a particularity of vision and a polemic, yet requiring the conventions of plot and structure, reportage is a ‘bastard’ genre.”