Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

From high above the street, a tower of pale stone rises through the middle of the frame in stepped setbacks, crowned by a dark globe of glass panes on a copper pedestal streaked with green. Its clock faces use five-pointed stars instead of numerals: this is the Paramount Building on Times Square. Behind it, in the haze, stands the spire of the Empire State Building. At the left rise dark glass slabs, one marked at its top with a bell inside a circle; at the right a brick building climbs in setbacks of its own; below, there are a rooftop water tank and a faded billboard, Save at Ninth Federal Savings.

The studium is generous: the ornament of the 1920s against the glass boxes of later decades, the globe still dark, as it had been since it was painted over for the wartime blackout, the stars on the clock echoing the Paramount logo. I could read this picture as a lesson in the history of Manhattan and be content. But two of the tower's clocks face me, one straight on and one from the side, and their hands do not agree.

That is the detail that pricks me. I once called cameras clocks for seeing, and here the camera has been pointed at clocks and cannot tell me the time. The photograph certifies that this tower, this haze and this billboard were there; that is its whole authority. But the hour, which the building offers twice, arrives in two versions, and the photograph does not say which, if either, is right. I am left with the certainty of the thing and the uncertainty of the moment, which is perhaps the truest description of any photograph: it has been, absolutely; when, exactly, it will never quite say.