After two summers on Cape Cod, Joel took the big camera back to the city. What the Cape had taught him came with him: to slow down, and to wait for the light.
In 1977 he began photographing St. Louis, invited by the St. Louis Art Museum. He had felt the pull of the city before he had any reason to go: “That size city, with that look and that light gave me a visceral reaction.” Four visits and four hundred negatives became the book “St. Louis and the Arch” (1980). Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch is both its subject and its non-subject: in some photographs it fills the frame, in others you have to look for it.
In New York, in 1978, he built a series around another landmark. “The Empire State Building played the role of Mount Fuji for me,” he said, thinking of Hokusai and the mountain in the distance behind ordinary life. It is in every photograph of the series, sometimes so small that you may miss it.
The camera still had to be set up, focused and loaded, with his head under the dark cloth. “But my instinct was still that of a street photographer.”
Works: Dusk, New Jersey, 1978 · Moon and Arch, 4th and Market, St. Louis, Missouri, 1977 · 10th and St. Charles, St. Louis, Missouri, 1978 · St. Louis, Missouri, 1978 · St. Louis, McDonald's, Two Arches, 1978 · New York City, 1978 (four photographs) · Miami Beach, Florida, 1978.
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