By 1950 Stanley Kramer's Home of the Brave had reached Times Square, and Faurer photographs its marquee at the instant the title became, for him, found language. The vast illuminated letters fill the upper frame — HOME OF THE BRAVE, then PRODUCED BY STANLEY KRAMER, RELEASED THRU UNITED ARTISTS — blazing against the night while a dense field of bulbs streams light down toward the street. To the right, KINSEY BLENDED WHISKEY and the grinning RUPPERT beer figure crowd in, the commercial chorus of postwar Broadway lit to saturation.
Against this electric wall, three or four men stand in flat black silhouette, hatted and anonymous, their backs to us as they face the lights. Faurer has arranged the picture so that the human figures register only as dark cut-outs, dwarfed by typography, swallowed by the very brightness they have come to watch. The contrast is total: incandescent text above, opaque bodies below, the spectator reduced to a shape while the slogan of national courage hangs over him, ironic and enormous.
That irony is the work's deliberate content. Faurer treats the square as a ready-made tableau, letting the marquee's words do double duty as caption and indictment — a brave home advertised in light to citizens rendered faceless beneath it. Kelton's printing pushes the blacks to velvet and lets the bulbs flare, preserving the charged theatricality of a 1950 night when American confidence and American loneliness shared the same block of neon.
By 1950 Stanley Kramer's Home of the Brave had reached Times Square, and Faurer photographs its marquee at the instant the title became, for him, found language. The vast illuminated letters fill the upper frame — HOME OF THE BRAVE, then PRODUCED BY STANLEY KRAMER, RELEASED THRU UNITED ARTISTS — blazing against the night while a dense field of bulbs streams light down toward the street. To the right, KINSEY BLENDED WHISKEY and the grinning RUPPERT beer figure crowd in, the commercial chorus of postwar Broadway lit to saturation.
Against this electric wall, three or four men stand in flat black silhouette, hatted and anonymous, their backs to us as they face the lights. Faurer has arranged the picture so that the human figures register only as dark cut-outs, dwarfed by typography, swallowed by the very brightness they have come to watch. The contrast is total: incandescent text above, opaque bodies below, the spectator reduced to a shape while the slogan of national courage hangs over him, ironic and enormous.
That irony is the work's deliberate content. Faurer treats the square as a ready-made tableau, letting the marquee's words do double duty as caption and indictment — a brave home advertised in light to citizens rendered faceless beneath it. Kelton's printing pushes the blacks to velvet and lets the bulbs flare, preserving the charged theatricality of a 1950 night when American confidence and American loneliness shared the same block of neon.