Description
The image is taken from a slight elevation, in the milky light of a winter’s day. Tenth Avenue drives in a straight line until it dissolves into the haze, lined with brick buildings and their fire escapes, with signs painted directly onto the walls and billboards perched on the rooftops. The snow, pushed into grey drifts along the pavements, tells the season; the wet asphalt throws back the lights of the cars, and the yellow cabs punctuate the roadway like so many markers. This is a New York without monuments, the New York of ordinary avenues where the city shows its substance: brick, cast iron, tarmac, a veiled sky. The perspective, almost perfectly centred, turns the street into a corridor and gives the photograph its depth — the eye travels along it as one might walk up the avenue, junction after junction, into the haze.
