Sure, the many advertising messages flashing and glowing from the billboards in Times Square in New York bathe the square in a very special light at any time of the day or night. Times Square gets a special aura when it rains. Then it glitters in a very beguiling way. The water drops polish up the light that breaks and reflects in them. Even the asphalt glows and the sheet metal of the vehicles as if they had caught fire, as if they were glowing.
At the same time, the mood in Times Square changes as a number of passers-by put on more or less transparent raincoats made of thin plastic. Like ghostly beings, they then stand at the traffic lights or scurry along their paths, robbed of their contours by their cloaks, which, when drops of water run down them, themselves become light-catchers again. This is how the New York writer Siri Hustvedt describes it in her essay that precedes the photo book “Times Square in the Rain”.
This shows a series of almost one hundred images taken by photographer Spencer Ostrander in 2018 and 2019. These are explosions of red, pink, orange, yellow, green and blue, sometimes bordered or framed by a deep black. Photographs, some of which at first glance could be mistaken for paintings, according to Siri Hustvedt.
New York can be a tough place, especially in the rain.
(Photo: Spencer Ostrander)
Despite this joy of colour, there is also a melancholy in the pictures, at least in part of them. Who likes standing in the rain? And so, as a viewer of the photos, one sees tired, empty, sometimes sorrowful faces. It can’t be the weather alone. In her essay, Siri Hustved goes into detail about the fact that when it rains, tourists stay away and then only workers and strays are out and about. Times Square is not a place for rich people. And the advertising messages on the billboards with their “Because you’re worth it” buy messages shine in the face of people who would rather not be on the winning side of life and certainly not of late capitalism.
New York can be a tough place, as Spencer Ostrander shows in this series of photos. And Times Square is a particularly paradoxical place, with its boundless promises and its limited passers-by. Some people are hard to look at for more than a second or two, they seem too vulnerable. But Ostrander does not expose these people in his photographs. He shows moments in which both individuals and the entire Times Square are devastated. In which it is no longer about cutting a good figure, keeping up appearances, but only about staying as dry as possible.
Often you don’t see any eyes at all. Because the faces disappear into the hoods or the people are photographed from behind. Because Ostrander only targets her legs or arms or her torso. Because he wants to capture the magic of a place that shows a lot only indirectly and in excerpts: behind panes or in mirrors, reflected twice and three times. We don’t see the real thing, but images, shadows, distorted and softened by filters, be it transparent umbrellas or rain hoods, be it the rain-soaked glass of car windows. An exception is the policewoman who stoically goes about her job, defying the weather: keeping an eye on things. Ready to intervene if necessary.
In the context of the other photographs, the photograph seems downright strange. Because what we see and what this policewoman apparently also sees is hardly tangible. Contours dissolve, everything becomes color and surface, flows into one another. The night does the rest. Nothing seems tangible anymore. As if reality were dissolving. And, yes, indeed, as if ghostly beings populate Times Square as soon as it rains. In the last photograph in the volume, a rain cloak is seen lying on the wet pavement like the shed skin of a reptile. Or just like a ghost that will float away in the next moment, with the next breeze.
Before that, however, one saw different things: people waving and those shielding a second, hands intertwined and arms wrapped around hips. Small gestures of affection. By people who might even feel safer in the predominantly warm light, perhaps more so than during the day when it’s dry.
Spencer Ostrander: Times Square in the Rain. With an essay by Siri Hustvedt. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin 2022. 128 pages, 48 euros.