Several frames are pressed into a single negative here, the method Faurer turned to in 1949 once he had begun to distrust the lone, legible exposure as a way of recording a crowded, commercial city. He layers them into one another: a man in a suit and snap-brim hat stands translucent at the center, his torso dissolving into the girders and marquee of an elevated platform, while ghostly pedestrians drift across the lower margin and the word "Starring" surfaces, backward and dim, from some movie advertisement absorbed into the emulsion.
The picture belongs to a body of multiple-exposure work Faurer pursued in these years, when he was supporting himself with fashion assignments for Junior Bazaar and Flair yet spending his nights walking Times Square and Forty-second Street. He had absorbed the example of Walker Evans and the encouragement of Robert Frank, his friend and studio-mate, but the deliberate superimposition was his own restless invention, a way of pressing the simultaneity of the city onto a single negative.
What results is not confusion but a kind of distilled truth about the place. Faces stack on faces; the central man seems both present and already departed, a commuter half-erased by the crowd he moves through. The image registers the loneliness Faurer found at the heart of the metropolis, and it shows how far his vision had advanced by the end of the 1940s, toward an art that fused documentary fact with private reverie.
Several frames are pressed into a single negative here, the method Faurer turned to in 1949 once he had begun to distrust the lone, legible exposure as a way of recording a crowded, commercial city. He layers them into one another: a man in a suit and snap-brim hat stands translucent at the center, his torso dissolving into the girders and marquee of an elevated platform, while ghostly pedestrians drift across the lower margin and the word "Starring" surfaces, backward and dim, from some movie advertisement absorbed into the emulsion.
The picture belongs to a body of multiple-exposure work Faurer pursued in these years, when he was supporting himself with fashion assignments for Junior Bazaar and Flair yet spending his nights walking Times Square and Forty-second Street. He had absorbed the example of Walker Evans and the encouragement of Robert Frank, his friend and studio-mate, but the deliberate superimposition was his own restless invention, a way of pressing the simultaneity of the city onto a single negative.
What results is not confusion but a kind of distilled truth about the place. Faces stack on faces; the central man seems both present and already departed, a commuter half-erased by the crowd he moves through. The image registers the loneliness Faurer found at the heart of the metropolis, and it shows how far his vision had advanced by the end of the 1940s, toward an art that fused documentary fact with private reverie.