Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 1938

Christmas at Kennedy Airport belongs to the moment, around 1968, when Joel Meyerowitz was still working primarily in black and white and beginning to argue, against the grain of his peers, that the descriptive frame and the unruly street could be reconciled. The picture records a late-fifties Cadillac parked nose-away at an empty curb in Queens, its fins rising like blades from the snow, roof and trunk smoothed under fresh fall, a single round taillight and a strip of bumper still catching the night. A second finned car crowds behind it; a bare tree leans in from the left edge. Nothing has passed: the curb is unbroken, the road untracked.

What lifts the frame out of mere observation is the ornament burning off-center at upper right — a decorative star strung above the terminal, its points drawn into long needles by the falling snow and the lens, too brilliant for tinsel, nearly astronomical. Meyerowitz lets it preside over a distinctly American nativity of parked sedans and bare branches, and the substitution is exact: the airport, that secular cathedral of arrival and departure, stands in for Bethlehem.

The discipline here — the patience to hold still in foul weather until the light composes itself — is precisely what he would carry into the color work that made his name, the large-format street and Cape Cod pictures now held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and the Whitney. These early Kennedy Airport negatives seldom leave institutional keeping. The snow completes the argument, converting a parking lot into a place charged with expectancy.