His own face is the thing he refuses to give us. A dark silhouette of a man in a hat fills the centre of the frame, head and shoulders rendered as pure shadow, and behind that absence the city goes on: a window, a tower receding into pale sky, the iron lattice of the El station looking toward Tudor City. Louis Faurer has photographed himself in 1946 as a hole cut into Manhattan, a man present only as the shape he blocks from the light.
The eye keeps trying to enter him and slides off, into the lit interior framed by the window, where another figure sits small and turned away, anonymous, a stranger occupying the very space where the self should be. Around the edges the curtain's scalloped lace, a hat rack to the right, a glowing sign to the left — the furniture of a diner or a window display — crowd in like the ordinary clutter we walk past without seeing. Faurer saw it, and used it to frame his own erasure.
To make a self-portrait by disappearing is a particular kind of honesty. The walker in the city is always partly a ghost, half-attached to the crowds he moves among, recording everyone but himself. Here the recorder steps into the picture only to dissolve, leaving the buildings to stand for him, the lamps to keep their small vigil. He is the darkest thing in the photograph and the least knowable, a man who would rather show you the street he loved than the face that loved it.
His own face is the thing he refuses to give us. A dark silhouette of a man in a hat fills the centre of the frame, head and shoulders rendered as pure shadow, and behind that absence the city goes on: a window, a tower receding into pale sky, the iron lattice of the El station looking toward Tudor City. Louis Faurer has photographed himself in 1946 as a hole cut into Manhattan, a man present only as the shape he blocks from the light.
The eye keeps trying to enter him and slides off, into the lit interior framed by the window, where another figure sits small and turned away, anonymous, a stranger occupying the very space where the self should be. Around the edges the curtain's scalloped lace, a hat rack to the right, a glowing sign to the left — the furniture of a diner or a window display — crowd in like the ordinary clutter we walk past without seeing. Faurer saw it, and used it to frame his own erasure.
To make a self-portrait by disappearing is a particular kind of honesty. The walker in the city is always partly a ghost, half-attached to the crowds he moves among, recording everyone but himself. Here the recorder steps into the picture only to dissolve, leaving the buildings to stand for him, the lamps to keep their small vigil. He is the darkest thing in the photograph and the least knowable, a man who would rather show you the street he loved than the face that loved it.