Gus Powell’s No York The first, and greatest, street photograph was Louis Daguerre’s 1839 “Boulevard du Temple”. Jules Verne would have been ten the day this image was made. Had he arrived from Nantes yet, the bustle on the street would have doubtless inspired his “Paris in the Twentieth Century,” written in 1863 and deemed too dismal a vision of the future to be published—and then only discovered in 1989, in a trunk. “What would one of our ancestors have said on seeing these boulevards, illuminated with a brightness comparable to the sun, or the thousand carriages circulating silently on the deadening bitumen of the streets, or the shops as rich as palaces producing white beams of light; these avenues as wide as squares.” Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life was published in 1863, not coincidentally the year of the Salon de Refusés and Manet’s Déjeuner sur L’herbe. And so we think of Modern Paris, and from there of Modern Life, as being born in 1863, fathered by Baudelaire’s Flaneur and mothered by Whistler’s White Girl, snaking out with complexity and contradiction and strangeness into the streets. Of course the street of “Boulevard du Temple” looks almost empty, but for a man in tails and a low-slung, saucer-like cap, leg up, legendarily having his shoes shined. Daguerre’s exposure might have been 20 minutes, letting us see right through the swell of midday Boulevard life, in this case only peopled by the one man standing still. It is very much a street photograph, consisting almost entirely of street. In most of what we call “street photography” we can’t see the street for its people. I’ve always assumed the savvy Daguerre posed the man there, looking so like “staffage,” the small figures in traditional landscape paintings standing in the woods to give scale to the sublime. The art critic Jerry Saltz told me that he thought the sublime exists now, not in nature, but “Between Us.” This somewhat enigmatic comment seemed so sincere it felt like a plea; a need for it to be true. That would hold with past expectations of the sublime: it was never thought to exist in nature until the Industrial Revolution. The sublime is where we house our hunger for meaning, and so is always a marker of a culture’s willful picture of itself. The century between the writing of “Paris in the Twentieth Century” and its publication is certainly the Era of “Between Us.” And the history of street photography is the history of our sense of our sweaty new sublime togetherness. From Lartique’s joyous, hand-cranked-seeming kinetographie, testing the limits of cinema’s “persistence of vision,” to Garry Winogrand’s critical kilterlessness, and now to Gus Powell, the street photograph is a measure of our sublime: of how we want ourselves to be. Winogrand seems to mark the end of the Modernist street. Like Ornette Coleman finally divorcing the saxophone solo from the last vestiges of dance music, Winogrand’s New York and Dallas and L.A. are formally fracturing before us. There is a bold photographicness to everything he pictured: the camera is unforgettably present. G.W., though, disdained the terms “street photographer” and “snapshot aesthetic.” And why not: his pictures, for all their plain lust and macho “Ma, watch this!” are measures of a culture coming apart. A great Modernist artist, his form follows function. The sublime in Winogrand is atomic: energy produced by fracture and fission. And like the nuclear buildup, their formal inventiveness and wrenched-open paradigm represents the practical limits of a species of intense intentional scrutiny. So how do we make street photographs after Winogrand? The Postmoderns knew. You don’t. Cindy Sherman refused at Buffalo State, and went on to concoct pastiches and parodies that spoke about that inability, referring all photographic images back to cultural sources that informed them. Gus Powell, though, is a Metamodern, a post-Postmodern artist for whom the arch arguments of high concept photography have lost their savvy anguished punch. Powell’s street work, however, is as much a measure of his New York as Winogrand’s was, and as savvy of its role in cultural history as Sherman’s. New York has always been measured as a dynamic system. Its bustle and catalytic growth are all the 30th century archivists will know about the city, reading from Walt Whitman’s Manhatta: “Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;” to Lorca’s Poet in New York: “The light is buried under chains and noises in an impudent challenge to rootless science. And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.” In 1909, Essayist John Jay Chapman wrote, "The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost,” which is a perfect evocation of all that has been thought necessary about street photography. Dynamic systems settle into fixed points, or “attractors.” The fall-forward drive of the city has anointed photography the preserver of its discrete meanings. But New York means differently now. It is not so dynamic, so catalytic, such an ever increasing asymptote of power and drive. It has lost its manufacturing base. Its class structure, (which Mayor John Lindsay described as “Not only…the nation's melting pot, it is also the casserole, the chafing dish and the charcoal grill”) has flattened out. Working people can’t afford to live in the city, and are bussed in to fix up the Gap. The city has shifted from a site of small, individual struggles, to part of the ordered, ordeal-less Corporate ideal of America’s standardized suburbs. Were Gus Powell a Romantic he would screen the new corporate classless New York for revelatory moments of virulent human struggle. He would ignore the multinational signage and overall benevolence of a culture glazed behind its addiction to consumption. He would reach back to Winogrand’s cracked, aching forms built to hew to the fractures of the 60s. But he hasn’t. Like the greatest American photographers from Timothy O’Sullivan to Walker Evans to Robert Adams, he has been able to look full-on at the very plastic present without nostalgia for earlier eddies in the flux. Most major religions tend to back-date their creation myths about 3,000 years, assuming the prestige of longevity. Like fishermen with their daily catch, photographers too often hoist up the gravity of the old as evidence of their own weightiness. Gus Powell’s New York is not the crush of the Ashcan school; not the “horrific, the unspeakable, extraordinary, yet partly interesting, amusing and above all bristling New York” of Henry James (who, by the way, referred the city as "crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history.") Powell’s pictures are not about the clash of high- and low-brow, but about the encroachment of the middlebrow, or of no brow at all. Powell made most of his street work during his lunch hours working at an important midtown cultural institution. And more ways than structurally, his photographs are indebted to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. O’Hara worked at another important midtown cultural institution, and spent his lunch hours building useful little nests out of delicately felt tendrils of information about movie stars, cigarettes, bookstores, bank tellers, wind, light, headlines, and life. His poems were thought “light” by many. And compared to the other poets I’ve dragged into this essay, they were. They did not impress us with their depth, but endowed us with their truth. They followed the dictum of the filmmaker, Robert Bresson, who said “Do not strain after poetry. It penetrates, unaided, through the joins.” And though Bresson was talking about the oneiric power of the edit, we can add Gus Powell’s photographs into the equation easily: By not straining after excess human drama; not using overfamiliar, too expressive forms, Powell’s pictures show us Millennial New York in all its undramatic glory. We are constantly reminded, in Powell’s pictures, of the Charm Removal Service, which steals into your neighborhood at night and turns your dive bar into a Starbucks. As if there were neighborhoods anymore. By centering his practice on the new Times Square, Powell avoids New York clichés; sticking to the more pathological corporate cliché of urban renewal. Even his World Trade Center pictures show the place for the mall it instantly became. The people have space for eath other in Powell’s New York, and its rough walls are being reconstructed behind plywood scrims. In the end, these are not pictures of New York. They are pictures of “Between Us.” Even in the endless strip mall of American culture, the light is beautiful, and people’s hair blows around. This classless city, free of upheaval, is doubly meaningful for reminding us how colorful and intent we are; how dailiness puts history to rest. The Boulevard du Temple is gone, replaced by the Manhattan mall. But its people have returned. Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century; New York of the twentieth. Perhaps the 21st century street photographers of Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai or Caracas can corner the Winograndian market on upheaval and formal shock. For now, we have Gus Powell to show us how human we are and how devoted to that humanity photography remains.