Neville Wakefield

Daido Moriyama: ’71-NY’
Roth Horowitz, LLC / PPP Editions, 2002
ISBN 0967077494

Dark with something more than night, New York, 1971 is a city of shadows. Shot without heed to the accepted protocols, these chance condensations of light mix evidence with abstraction. Like the radar sweep, they obliterate as they reveal. They record less the monuments that loom all around, than the intermittent social architecture that fills the spaces in between – the pungent odors that hold the back seat of the cab after its occupant is long gone; the rodent citadels of garbage that pour onto the unclaimed sidewalk; the product-filled vitrines of overlit bodegas that advertise to the street as they conceal the store within. Among these casual acquaintances of private and public are woven the facades of another kind of tenement: a state of being in which raw, repetitive agitation has been exacerbated into beautiful psychosis. What is felt is the form of a dense and lonely metropolis. And from its erratic rhythm, we learn to take the pulse of a stranger in this the strangest of strange lands.

More than twenty years before, when Weegee fell to the call of the sirens, this same city had the appearance of an overdressed morgue. His freeze-dried crime-scenes anatomized a different kind of street theatre: a tragi-comic flashlit dramatization of a roiling id played against the unchecked, hard-boiled super-ego of detection and prevention. The characters that inhabit Weegee’s photographs suggest self-conscious actors in the roles of life. And in the same way that Beaudelaire urged the painter of modern life to be attentive to the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners found on the nineteenth century Parisian streets, Weegee’s danse macabre draws its own circumstantial conclusions from the passage of the everyday. But in Weegee’s unflinching close-up vision, we find ourselves looking only at what he wants us to see. The photographers’ scrutiny wrenches his subject out of time and place. The city is never more than the implied backdrop for the deadly banality of catastrophe, a solid phantasm of normality through which is leaked tell-tale mixtures of blood and crime.

Seen through very different eyes, the streets of New York in 1971 are still stage to a theatre of the real, albeit Weegee’s dramatic clairvoyance has softened into the furtive and affectionate alienation of the stranger; the crime-scene has dissolved into a larger mise-en-scene of urbanity cast across an empire of fading signs. The frame shifts and, with it, the frame of reference. No longer snared by the voyeuristic, predatory eye, the image is now released from the evidential custody of the event, and the decisive moment is all but dissolved into the larger and more ambiguous social. What we see is the city viewed from the intersection of hard and soft architectures; a place that exists somewhere between the mechanistic and subjective eye, between the constructions of the city and the deconstructions of its inhabitants. In this, the photographs still acknowledge the city as battlefield, and that in these spaces of desertion war is being waged night and day. But of the war’s aims they tell you nothing.

Weegee armed himself for the frontline with an oversize flash that left on the body of his naked city the magnesium calling card of forensic flare. The author of the 1971 photographs carries with him no such illuminations. In fact, he seems to transport his own portable darkness, punctuated occasionally by streetlights, headlights, traffic lights and neons that semaphore the life of the city from off the grid. Within the available light he finds only the amplification of the obvious. A man waits to cross the street. Walk, Don’t Walk. Regular, Menthol. So blinks a city that is impervious to the figure that stands stiffly erect, aware that waiting is vulnerability and that just behind him and to his right is someone pointing something at him whose purpose he doesn’t care to recognize. Some figures carry the uneasiness that comes from wondering what the faces around one hide. This is a stranger’s vision, a stranger who wonders at the roots others find in the concrete of a city jungle; or, rather, it is the vision of one who begins to be aware of the shapes adopted by others, and, in doing so, begins to question his own form.

As often as not, the streets and city spaces in these photographs are abandoned or occupied by urban monads huddled in singularity. Kids play in the schoolyard, the contingency of their alliances enhanced by their position in a desolate no-man’s land between two opposing grids – the diagonals of the storm fence that separates them from the world outside and the well-built orthogonals of knowledge within. Every now and then an animal strays upon the wasteland. A horse lends its primeval presence to the relentless geometry of concrete and steel. Pigs hump in a poster on the street. A dog stares out from a television screen, its head bowed like a bull in final erotic confrontation with the matador’s sword. These are the archaic talismans of the street conjured out of the flotsam and jetsam of photographic practice: photographs of photographs, blown-out images overexposed to the point of graphic incoherence, half-frame images for which traditional ideas of content have been relegated to the half-not-taken. What is captured is equal to what is missed, as the camera divides the eye into hundreds of partial truths, the half-lives of which continue their passage to endless decay. All but excluded is the punctum of the photograph. In its place is the white noise of circumstance detached from intentionality. Even the monuments that rise above the visual static – the Flatiron Building, Radio City Music Hall and the more recent skyline additions of the Verrazano Bridge and The World Trade Towers – appear not as iconic objects but as the skyline encephalograph of internal disturbance.

That these blurry, intentionally unfocussed and grainy photographs owe something to William Klein’s document of the same city, published just six years previously, is sure. Klein favored evocation over representation. His willingness to acknowledge the limitations of language that sought the stamp of clarity was, paradoxically, the very thing that put him in the picture. Perhaps this photographer found in those images not the existential anxieties of crowds and power but the freedom that came with their violent, and sometimes tender, intercession within the giant circulatory system of the city, with its flow of people and time. But where Klein’s New York was tuned to a free-form jazz of smoky syncopation, this later version was rooted in the harsher, and more relentless repetitions of The Velvet Underground, whose first album became the premonitional soundtrack for a turning decade. Cuts such as “Black Angel’s Death Song” undid the classical blues-derived forms of rock and roll to let in the darker monotonal detritus of a more chaotic and ungraspable reality. Vocals became used not for their lyric capacity but as instrumentation, human noise that edges into the amplified feedback. 1968 was still a year away, but the Underground already knew that there were no more dreams of a new and better society, peace and love in the world. Here is a description of life on the backside of the city - drug misuse, sexual deviations, cold and egoistic women: fear of life. By 1971, the era of “White heat, white light” had already taken hold and the stranger’s images of New York capture a gray area of indistinction; they acknowledge, perhaps, that the inner life of his bewildered and bewildering subjects had been pushed out of definitive photographic ground and into the underexposed areas of darkness.

Nor was it a coincidence that Warhol, whose silk-screened banana graced the cover of the first Underground album, understood more than any artist of his generation the entropy of the aura. In his hands, T.V. screens, movie screens and silk screens all became the blank billboards of one sort or another, voids filled by the lapses and stuttering of prosaic celebrity. His cold parody of mass ad appeal opened the void that yawns beneath the discourse of promotion, and thereby commuted the serial pleasures of pop consumerism into the no less serial death of affect and the specularization of disaster. By the end of the sixties, television had created its own culture, one in which the heat generated by self expression was continually dissipated in the entopic glare of a coolly reiterated narcissism. Television’s reflection bore none of the soul-searching burdens of self-scrutiny that had so haunted the generation before. Now it was enough to watch, to be the disinterested observer floating above the interest groups of mass marketers. In this climate it made sense that conformity should determine the new individualism. The marginal no longer suggested uniqueness and to this extent Warhol’s bland translucency, as of frosted glass, held both depth and surface at bay.

Some of this same depthlessness grips these skewed, seemingly accidental images of the city. They did not have to have been composed in the camera that the photographer had with him at all times, so much as had to have passed across its retinal screen. Splintered and partially destroyed, they act as shards of a greater visual reality, the totality of which can never be discerned. “Visual images are not ideological themselves,” declared the manifesto of the Provoke movement, Japan’s answer to the political and moral unrest of ’68. “They cannot represent the totality of an idea, nor are they interchangeable like words. However, their irreversible materiality – reality cut out by the camera – belongs to the reverse side of the world of language.” Out of this materiality have been formed here descriptions of interested disinterest. Morbidity may lurk amidst the neon blooms and turnstile chapels of fluorescent saints and lend the democracy of the street the same sort of fictive glamour that Warhol found in his taxidermic portraits of celebrity. “I don’t think there’s any place in the world like New York City as far as street life goes,” Warhol wrote in his deadpan black and white essay on America. “Here you can see every class, every race, every sex and every fashion bumping up against each other. Everyone gets to mix and mingle and you can never guess what combinations you’re going to see next.”

Cripples cross the street in wheelchairs or hobble on crutches, creating in their slow progress islands of vulnerability amid honking seas of motorized aggression. Women in loose knit granny hats and the oversized facial furniture of the fifties lean into the bottom of an off-kilter frame, spring like soft gargoyles from the pediments of faceless high-rises. What they convey is not the distance of the observer but the bob and weave of the street, with its particular choreography of order and chaos, motion and stillness. Photography, the bride of mechanical reproduction, had long stripped the image of its famed aura and left only “irreversible materiality” wavering on the verge of incoherence. Beyond this is an elusive phenomenology: one man’s participation in a strange and unknowable world. Of his friend’s activities during this, his first visit to New York, Tadanori Yokoo remarked: “He never seemed to go out with the object of taking photographs, he just kept visiting the same streets like a dog urinating on telegraph poles to mark his territory.”

Three years later, in 1974, some of these images became the substance of a book. The book was titled Another Country in New York; homage to the similarly raw beauty of the same urban landscape described in James Baldwin’s 1962 novel ‘Another Country’. Rutted by social injustice and swept by the prevailing tides of love and despair, Baldwin’s account of the city is set to the harsh lyric of itinerant, lovelorn loneliness mitigated by drugs, alcohol and sexual encounter. As they weave a gentle and wistful poetry into the city’s patterns of violence and racial bigotry, his characters who are but projected shadows, reflect a psyche that continually wavers between seeing and willful blindness, between the truth and its myriad representations. Just as the title suggests the solitude and disconnection of a tourist isolated in a foreign country, so the prose circles characters who, adrift, cling to life rafts of human connection. And like this photographer, Baldwin understands the writer’s role as witness. An eloquent outsider, he once claimed that the writer is not telling many stories, but one, and that during his life, he is simply adding to that story, delving deeper into the same projected shadows with which he began.

“`71-NY” includes every image of one stranger’s territorial odyssey. But for all of its inclusiveness – views taken from the windows of moving cabs, views of still t.v. screens, avenues engulfed in exhalations of steam, towering facades and fugitive desires – these images are never more than an incomplete portrait of a space and time whose undeclarative character can never be fully determined. And onto all of this is poured the soft silence of the print, falling across our vision like the volcanic ash of photographic extinction