Adam Gopnik - Street Life 汉译

We see New York, and sometimes, as Henry James asked us to, we “do it”—explore and conquer it—but what we see when we see it is so far unlike what we experience when we’re doing it that the difference itself can become a subject for art. The city sneaks up on us in pictures, and we are startled to see what it looks like even when what it looks like is just us, doing what we really do. We respond to truthful depictions of New York with the same surprise that we feel when we hear a recording of our own voice.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

This surprise is one of the subjects of the extraordinary, lost—or, actually, never found in the first place—American photographer Jerry Shore. Shore did New York, was done by it, and then became a kind of artist-martyr to the act of seeing it. In the last decade of his life, Shore, after twenty years as one of the leading short-form commercial directors of his time, fell down a well of alcohol and isolation. He died in 1994, at the age of fifty-nine, and left behind four thousand photographic prints, most of New York City streets, in Queens and Manhattan, in Turtle Bay and Chelsea and the old meatpacking district. Only one of them had ever been sold. The collector Daniel Wolf bought all of Shore’s work, in 1995, and has archived it, so that, for the first time, it is possible to see the range and intensity of what he accomplished, and discover an original New York eye.

Jerry Shore’s story is simple, in many ways typical, and in most ways sad. He grew up in Oxford Circle, a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood outside Philadelphia, and, along with his twin brother, Fred, attended art schools at a time when Philadelphia had a great many of them. “He loved art,” Fred says. “He just lived everything visual.” He came to New York in the early sixties, like so many others, intending to become a painter—he worshipped de Kooning and Hofmann and Kline.

But he loved, too, the burgeoning realist and documentary cinema—his brother recalls that he had a special passion for Rossellini and Antonioni—and he soon found work with the director Harold Becker, who was then making documentary films. Together they made a seminal short film about the great French photographer Eugène Atget, who wandered the unpopulated streets of Paris with a huge camera, searching for images of the city that endured and the city that was disappearing. The Becker-Shore film is a beautiful fifteen minutes, silent save for Satie’s plangent “Gymnopédie No.1” (not nearly the cliché that it later became), with slow, floating pans of Atget’s photographs of empty Paris streets and bridges and parks. It is lovely and sad enough to soften the heart of any lover of Paris, and oddly premonitory of the city views that Shore later did alone, in the same key but on a very different instrument.

Shore found himself as a filmmaker, and for a while he became one of the most successful of the swinging generation of commercial directors, at a time when the thirty-second spot was, if not exactly a theatre of creativity, at least a medium of riches and excitement. In 1969, after doing advertising work alongside Bert Stern and Jerry Bruckheimer, he opened his own shop, Jerry Shore Productions, and for the next fifteen years he was one of the most commercial of commercial directors. He made thirty- and sixty-second spots for Pepsi, Revlon, Maybelline. He was known for his lighting, his ability to make a seemingly improvised situation glamorous. Inevitably, like his contemporaries Jerry Schatzberg and Stern, he went off to Hollywood, where he made a couple of little features, including an adaptation of a Flannery O’Connor short story.

Desires are eternal, but their biddings are temporal; when Shore returned to New York, in the eighties, he found that the advertising industry had grown beyond the small, hip shops that had been dominant a decade earlier. Work suddenly became very hard to find, and his search for it was not helped by his drinking and depression. Friends say that he lost confidence, as can happen quickly to a man caught up in a confidence game.

Yet this was the moment when he gave himself over to a project that he may have begun sometime earlier, in the late seventies. He travelled through Manhattan and Queens, making large-scale, exquisitely printed color photographs of some of the most aesthetically unpersuasive streets in New York City. For the next ten years, until his death, he pursued this project, with a focus and self-discipline made all the more moving by his ever more distressed circumstances.

Some colleagues who thought they knew him well didn’t even know that he was taking photographs, though on rare occasions he asked friends to accompany him. He would dress, they recall, in an unchanging daily uniform: worn bomber jacket, flannel shirt, khakis, and saddle shoes. For all his personal disorganization, he was able to handle his work with extraordinary care and methodical purpose: he roved the streets with a 35-mm. camera, “sketching” possible scenes in the least pictured vistas of the city. Then, later in the week, he would return and be ready to make his picture, waiting for the right light—the pregnant, rather than the decisive, moment—to take and keep a city corner that no one else might have thought worth preserving. The project, which seems to have begun as a kind of surcease from his commercial work—a way of recapturing some of the concerns and obsessions that had led him to New York and to art in the first place—soon became a substitute. It was all he did; given the number of images he left behind, he must have been out with his camera, hunting scenes and taking pictures, nearly every day until he died.