Description:
Usher in uniform, with movie listing at right and ticket book in background
Label Text:
Faurer’s Globe Theatre, NY, NY communicates a sense of anxiety typical of film noir. The texts in this photograph, when read as Surrealist found objects, function as omens of violence and underscore film noir’s portrayal of the city as dangerous.
Faurer’s photographs often position the viewer as part of the crowd or in the room. This intimate viewpoint reflects the how the street photography of this period tended to be more personal than that of the previous decade, and it offers a visual counterpart to the voiceover of film noir. Such forced intimacy invites the viewer to share in inside knowledge and seems to recruit the viewer to complicity in an impending crime.
In Globe Theatre, a movie listing offers various ominous possibilities for the scowling subject’s identity—a Public Enemy? Scarface? A Killer? The word “GLOBE” embroidered on his cap, however, reveals him to be only a theatre employee, not a criminal, thus diffusing some of the tension of the scene.
MD, PHOTOdocument exhibition, March 30, 2012-July 22, 2012
Subjects:
Photographic gelatin Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1986.114 |
