Why would a grown man surrender his head to a coin-fed box on 42nd Street? Faurer photographs him from behind in 1948: a suited figure stooped over a peep-show machine marked MIDGET MOVIES, 5¢, his head swallowed by the hood, his trousers creasing as he leans his weight onto the cabinet. The mirrored panel beside him throws the sign back as a reversed ghost, MIDGET MOVIES running the wrong way, and a second man rests there too, watching or waiting.
The picture is built from machinery as much as from people. Two viewing stations stand side by side, each crowned with a lurid frame of a pin-up, the nickel slots glinting, the whole apparatus promising privacy in the most public of arcades. Faurer is fascinated by this transaction between body and contraption—how a man rents a small dark window onto desire and disappears, briefly, into it, leaving only his back and the cut of his suit for us to read.
Printed by Chuck Kelton three decades on, the gelatin silver holds the booth's worn veneer, the smeared mirror, the cheap glamour of the marquee cards. The photograph keeps what the arcade discarded: a five-cent appetite, a nameless customer, the reflected lettering that survives only because it once stood in front of a lens. Faurer treats the place as a thing to be salvaged, its tawdry glow fixed in metal long after the machines were hauled away.
Why would a grown man surrender his head to a coin-fed box on 42nd Street? Faurer photographs him from behind in 1948: a suited figure stooped over a peep-show machine marked MIDGET MOVIES, 5¢, his head swallowed by the hood, his trousers creasing as he leans his weight onto the cabinet. The mirrored panel beside him throws the sign back as a reversed ghost, MIDGET MOVIES running the wrong way, and a second man rests there too, watching or waiting.
The picture is built from machinery as much as from people. Two viewing stations stand side by side, each crowned with a lurid frame of a pin-up, the nickel slots glinting, the whole apparatus promising privacy in the most public of arcades. Faurer is fascinated by this transaction between body and contraption—how a man rents a small dark window onto desire and disappears, briefly, into it, leaving only his back and the cut of his suit for us to read.
Printed by Chuck Kelton three decades on, the gelatin silver holds the booth's worn veneer, the smeared mirror, the cheap glamour of the marquee cards. The photograph keeps what the arcade discarded: a five-cent appetite, a nameless customer, the reflected lettering that survives only because it once stood in front of a lens. Faurer treats the place as a thing to be salvaged, its tawdry glow fixed in metal long after the machines were hauled away.