urbanphotos

The thing is to see the vision and not deny it; to care and admit that we do.
--Marianne Moore

Matt Weber began photographing seriously in 1984, at the age of twenty-six, while driving a New York City taxi cab. At first he was hoping only to capture some of the startling things he would see over the course of his long shifts, but gradually photography became his passion and then his art, and he was photographing from the driver’s street while stalled in traffic and waiting at read lights. When he left taxi driving in 1990 he began his current practice of photographing while walking in Manhattan on other business and on the errands that take him up and down Broadway from his apartment on West 86th Street.

From the beginning, then, his “material”, as Henry James said of Daumier’s, has been “the very medium in which he moves.”

It is some of the most public material imaginable, what anyone can see driving or walking on Manhattan streets at any specific hour. Unlike most of us, Weber not only sees but also feels it and registers it within himself; he notices and receives.

His is also some of the humblest material imaginable. With respect to ourselves it is largely of the most basic feelings, and of the body, which, in these pictures, is always doing something or being done to: going somewhere, being overwhelmed by or abandoning itself to some need or weakness, being pulled at by someone, pressing up against someone or something, setting itself against some condition, thought or feeling and waiting it out: arms and hands touching, cradling or threatening someone; faces gladdening at a joke, darkening with some disquiet, or, rigid with some purpose, or purposelessness, hard and precise as life masks.

Some of his subjects, like his homeless men in various kinds of misery, are people we often look at despite ourselves and quickly forget. Others, like his prostitutes in tight clothes, we look at but often pretend that we don’t. But almost all of his subjects are so ubiquitous and the passions that move them so muted that to the inattentive observer the people Weber notices are almost invisible. In New York, how many other lovers embrace with the same haste and ambiguity on street corners, how many other men run through traffic with the same over-the-shoulder glance as Weber’s, at the same time on the same day? They barely ripple the stream.

Weber draws his subjects strongly, specifically, and with a strangeness not always subtle, giving the impression that they are unique specimens of our kind and at moments not only of true but unique feeling.

The city of these pictures, lacking vistas, views and places, is a thing of details, walls, fences, windows, ironwork, business signs, a mural or two. Shabby and crumbling to sleek and shining, they are specific but unprepossessing instances of the general thing and express any city's range of old to new, poor to opulent. Yet Weber's workmanship gives the general account the terseness and sharpness of epigram. General, yes, but never generalized.

It is his gift, compounded in part of alert sensibilities, attentiveness, empathy, robustness and the capacity for wonder, that he sees and feels things not in relation but in their utterness.

An emblematic (as opposed to discursive) artist, his major note is concentration. His framing of a person or city detail distills subject to its essence. His strongest pictures have no minor subjects or incidental matter and thus achieve a seamless coherence of subject and context. He is interested in situations but not in situating them except, via an upraised fist, or a pause in a subway musician's performance, in the stream of time. Yet his pictures aren't anecdotal; nor do they report or describe. They present, with no explanations or digressions, no filling of the frame with engaging but ultimately extraneous detail; no ornament, no folderol. In the picture of a girl holding and encircled by a battered white plastic hoop the woman with a white cane, groping along the vestibule wall behind her, is, along with the girl's thin white tights, the tiled vestibule, and the hoop which suggests a halo, equally part of the experience.

In the long run it is experience, physical or emotional, that his pictures present.
They present it so immediately to sight that the other senses become, imaginatively, involved; the sense of touch (in the embraces, the caressing hands, cradling arms, the tugs at and shocks to the body) but also those of sound (that subway musician's silence is immediately imaginable, as are the whirr of a child's soap-bubble wand and a man's angry shout at a street vendor) and in pictures of eating and smoking, taste. In his strongest pictures the presentation of experience is direct and terse in the extreme, resulting in characters that are not only credible by virtue of their specific drawing and their appeal to the senses but are also such intense versions of what and who they are that they become symbolic both of themselves and of what they also are, individuals who, when contemplated long and carefully enough, become worlds, bringing the contemplative viewer into contact with what Flannery O’Connor called “the actual mystery of our position on this earth.”

Despite this concentration on the thing itself, his pictures often touch on irony, as in the picture of the shopping bag saying I Love NY above the side-view mirror's reflection of a homeless man in a doorway. The picture of a man putting his head through a wooden shutter as though rehearsing his own beheading shows Weber alert to his city's macabre undertones. Other pictures attain thematic or poetic meaning. The picture of a woman playing with her children while, in the distance, the World Trade Center burns is a direct, eloquent statement of the persistence of ordinary goodness at the outskirts of horror. And consider the picture, taken near the site of the catastrophe itself, of a woman turning her back on the crumbled towers as though unable to bear the sight of them. Weber has drawn her so gracefully that the picture penetrates to a deeper truth: that the world mysteriously stays beautiful not only despite but in the midst of horror.

Weber approaches his material with demands only upon himself: that he will be able to see whatever comes his way entirely as itself and that his forms will give the clear impression.

Although he has learned much from the works of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and other masters of his tradition, he works at being nobody but himself.

Weber calls this book The Urban Prisoner, and its many pictures of tight, shallow spaces, together with the sense it gives that Weber got out of Manhattan only rarely and briefly, as though on day passes, justifies the title and a reading of the imagery of fences, iron bars, closed doors and the like as prison symbols.

In all other respects this is the work of a free man.

Piczo