The Drama of the World Deserves Witnesses

We find ourselves in the heart of the action – even nearly six decades after the picture was taken. In the summer of 1967, Joel Meyerowitz captured a dramatic moment, which, even now, continues to stir feelings: the scene took place in Paris, by the Chausée d’Antin metro station, at the busy intersection between Boulevard Haussmann and Rue La Fayette. A young man in a suit and tie lies on his back with arms stretched above his head, directly next to the metro station. The barrier chain protecting the entrance to the station brushes his white shirt. Everything seems frozen – passers-by and tradespeople have stopped to look: questioning, curious, seemingly perplexed; the traffic is jammed in the background. Meyerowitz captured this moment of high emotional tension and complex actions with his Leica M2 and colour film. The motif is made even more enigmatic by a person in the centre of the photograph: a workman carrying a hammer squeezes his way between the Art Nouveau pillar of the metro entrance and the metal chains of the barrier and is about to step impassively over the man lying on the ground. Compassion, but also the strange connection that every viewer imagines between the workman with the hammer and the man on the ground, determine the drama of the picture that is still felt to this day. With quick reflexes, Meyerowitz captured this moment and at the same time reached an important understanding: “Which is the greater drama of life in the city – the fictional clash between two figures that is implied, or the indifference of one to the other that is real? A photograph allows for such contradictions in everyday life; more than that, it encourages them.”

An attentive flâneur, the photographer observed a unique scene and captured it for eternity amidst the turbulent flow of urban city life. The experiences of the trip to Europe reflect a time of upheaval in the photographer’s life and became decisive for his future career: “In 1966, I had made some money shooting an advertising job. Enough money that I thought I could go away to Europe for a year and just photograph. Perhaps it was that unconstrained openness to life that gave me, during that year and really ever since, the open-ended and curious willingness to let go of things and move on. It certainly informed my way of seeing in Europe. I was never happier and hungrier for the world to show itself to me. I found my character if one can ever really say that. I was fearless about entering places, groups, or situations that never would have proposed themselves to me before, as if carrying a camera gave me a licence to see, and on the strength of those impulses came the small revelations that photography builds upon. I know that the experience of making photographs in Europe changed me and gave me a perspective I needed to see myself, and then, when I returned home, to see America in a different way.”