The City For Real

Taking for granted that the creative capacities of photography are exceeded by painting, what a camera can document does become interesting in relation to cities and urban landscapes. What you might find, in an exploration of this, is an explosion of accidents, or of the accidental, wherein compositional fields or planar spaces are generated out of the contingencies of a city's workaday life. The artist's eye would be able to spot, and then document, the visual explosiveness of or by which compositions coalesce and then disintegrate in seeming solidity and then out into evanescence. The bemused epiphany which must've struck Mary Evelyn Harju as she snapped this portrait of me in Manhattan's East Village in 2007 is about all these issues. The sense of compositional rightness here, discovered by accident at an opportune moment, meant that she was doing one of the things she liked to do best— work from a seemingly simple premise on multiple levels. The portrait critiques me (singular, as myself, unlike in her paintings), critiques what an urban landscape is, then critiques Manhattan and specifically the East Village, all out of a compositional discovery coalescing spontaneously in front of her. The drollery of the cell-phone pedestrian in sandals, passing down Avenue A behind me, and as smudged, in a painterly way, as I am crisp, takes the found game and ups it even more.