Tenderness, on a city street at night, almost always looks like surveillance from the wrong angle. A woman in glasses, hair pinned up, reaches across and lays her hand flat on the back of a man's head — he is turned away from us, dark-suited, his neck and the careful part of his hair the only things he offers the camera. Her arm makes a long diagonal through the centre of the frame, the wrist circled by a thin bracelet, and behind them the parked cars and the bokeh of New York neon swim out of focus into a field of soft white coins.
It could be affection; it could be inspection. She might be smoothing his hair or checking it for something, her own face grave and absorbed, lips slightly parted, the expression of someone concentrating rather than caressing. Faurer leaves it open, which is the honest thing, because at this distance and this hour the difference between care and control was never going to declare itself. To touch someone's head is to claim a strange intimacy with the part of them that does the thinking.
I love how the man stays a stranger. We never see his face; he is all nape and shoulder, the recipient of a gesture he may not have asked for. Around them 1949 glows and blurs — the lights of cars, of shopfronts, of the unsleeping street — and the two figures hold their odd configuration in the foreground like a sculpture nobody commissioned. Faurer found his pictures in exactly these moments, the ones too ambiguous to caption and too true to ignore.
Tenderness, on a city street at night, almost always looks like surveillance from the wrong angle. A woman in glasses, hair pinned up, reaches across and lays her hand flat on the back of a man's head — he is turned away from us, dark-suited, his neck and the careful part of his hair the only things he offers the camera. Her arm makes a long diagonal through the centre of the frame, the wrist circled by a thin bracelet, and behind them the parked cars and the bokeh of New York neon swim out of focus into a field of soft white coins.
It could be affection; it could be inspection. She might be smoothing his hair or checking it for something, her own face grave and absorbed, lips slightly parted, the expression of someone concentrating rather than caressing. Faurer leaves it open, which is the honest thing, because at this distance and this hour the difference between care and control was never going to declare itself. To touch someone's head is to claim a strange intimacy with the part of them that does the thinking.
I love how the man stays a stranger. We never see his face; he is all nape and shoulder, the recipient of a gesture he may not have asked for. Around them 1949 glows and blurs — the lights of cars, of shopfronts, of the unsleeping street — and the two figures hold their odd configuration in the foreground like a sculpture nobody commissioned. Faurer found his pictures in exactly these moments, the ones too ambiguous to caption and too true to ignore.