Flatiron Nocturne
Modernist Meetings #7
Michael Patrick Brewster
A new mantle of steel gray snow; new snow barely blankets the ground, muffling all background noise. I walk through it downtown toward Madison Square Park. Ahead, ghostlike, the Flatiron looms though I cannot see it.
Listen to the snow softly, faintly falling. A silence so closely akin to music brushes against my ears while I try to imagine that invisible breeze carrying it to me. A stillness so resplendent in the deeping blue tranquility of shadowinfesting snow suffuses into some indeterminate haze.
I am deeply moved by the unseen quiet quickly colonizing the solemn streets. The streelights shed a gentle glow of fragile luminosity emanating in obscure pulses flashing against the nocturnal lines of Manhattan’s skyline. My eyes lift open to the sky — the snow falls. Here, there, snow drifts, mysteriously endures.
As I search for the specific angle of the Flatiron against the diffuse yellowy sky, each time trying to fix my perspective, a brief gust of gray snow erases that vantage and obscures my memory.
Yes, I have Steichen’s photo on my iPhone and Yes, I can crawl the internet for someone else who has already found and documented for all the very spot, but in this pedestrian exercise, I am Shackleton or Amudsen while the snow and wind collude against me.
My instinct fails my purpose, wants me to cross the street and seek shelter from the gathering winds. Without a bag to collect them in, I stand and steel myself on this wild and radiant windswept streetscape. My time is short, like Ozymandias I can only hope my images and words will endure.
I want only to recapture the early surprise Edward Steichen must have felt, even as he recaptured the Flatiron after his friend Alfred Stieglitz had already done so. But just as Hokusai had published thirty-six ukiyo-e prints of Mount Fuji, so too could this Manhattan Fuji withstand multiple photographers and continue to eternally endure.
And just as the wind dies and the snow momentarily settles, the Flatiron’s angular geometry materializes there. Two men approach as if on cue, dressed against the weather, carrying old-fashioned cameras. I instantly recognize Stieglitz and Steichen, comrades in art, engaged in deep conversation, their words, though, swallowed by the snowy abyss.
Trembling at the street corner, I am torn for a moment between capturing Mount Flatiron now, while the winds are in the bag and its looming presence is akin to the Titanic’s iceberg or turning and following the preeminent photographers of the modern era up 5th Avenue.
Almost without thinking, I snap a quick photo and hurry through the slippery snow after the men. Realizing I am about to lose them in the midtown labyrinth, I frame them crossing the street as the snow returns, a lamp illuminating the elegant patterns of their footprints. In no time, they are swallowed as if in mist, a mist-gray swirl of colorless snow, the chaos of entiwined being and invisibility.
