How do you photograph desire for a city from inside a moving box? Faurer's answer, made on bus number 7 in 1950, is to give us almost nothing but the dark—a great velvety field of black interior—and then two windows cut into it like illuminated playing cards. Through them, and only through them, the night blazes: Times Square in miniature, twice over, framed by the soft curved glass of the bus.
Each window holds its own little spectacle. Crowds swarm a lit corner, taxis and a double-decker bus nose through traffic, a marquee reads GRILL in fat bright letters. The two panes don't quite match, so the scene jumps slightly between them, a stereoscopic stutter that makes the whole glittering world feel provisional, glimpsed, already sliding past. At the bottom the dark backs of the bus seats rise up, anchoring us in here while everything we want is out there.
This is Faurer at his most rapturous and most withholding. The richness lives entirely in the contrast—plush black surround, jewel-bright apertures—a velvet jewelry box holding the city up to the light. He turns the ordinary act of riding home into voyeurism, longing, a love affair conducted through glass. You are never let out onto that radiant street. You only press your face to the window and watch it burn, then dim, then gone.
How do you photograph desire for a city from inside a moving box? Faurer's answer, made on bus number 7 in 1950, is to give us almost nothing but the dark—a great velvety field of black interior—and then two windows cut into it like illuminated playing cards. Through them, and only through them, the night blazes: Times Square in miniature, twice over, framed by the soft curved glass of the bus.
Each window holds its own little spectacle. Crowds swarm a lit corner, taxis and a double-decker bus nose through traffic, a marquee reads GRILL in fat bright letters. The two panes don't quite match, so the scene jumps slightly between them, a stereoscopic stutter that makes the whole glittering world feel provisional, glimpsed, already sliding past. At the bottom the dark backs of the bus seats rise up, anchoring us in here while everything we want is out there.
This is Faurer at his most rapturous and most withholding. The richness lives entirely in the contrast—plush black surround, jewel-bright apertures—a velvet jewelry box holding the city up to the light. He turns the ordinary act of riding home into voyeurism, longing, a love affair conducted through glass. You are never let out onto that radiant street. You only press your face to the window and watch it burn, then dim, then gone.