For a few years, and after reading Frank O'Hara's book of poems titles Lunch Poems, Gus Powell who worked in an office, midtown Manhattan , took to the street with his 35 mm camera loaded with color film. “The quiet gestures of strangers in daylight became significant, and these photographs became my lunch pictures.” These photographs are more than “pictures,” they are slices of Manhattan time peppered with Manhattan energetic and cosmopolitan spices. People have taken over the City and its streets, which is a remarkable event as in most American cities where the car rules. A New-Yorker looks at New York street energy of colors and movements, of incongruous, funny, bizarre, tender situations. He does so with a keen eye and a strict attention to details. Some of the most remarkable images convey the same sense of void but hopeful expectations as the two protagonists in Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot . These very images echo Philip Lorca Di Corcia, but they feel and are more spontaneous, less staged; they fell less treacherous for the viewer and the viewed in a certain way.

It is hard to look at Gus Powell's work and not think of Joel Meyerowitz.'s work in the 1970s in the very same streets, with probably the very same camera. This work was published in book-form in Wild Flowers (Little, Brown and Company, 1983) as well as in Sally Eauclaire's trilogy on new American color photography in the early 1980s. In the last volume of the series, American Independents , twelve pages are dedicated to Joel Meyerowitz's street photography under the title “Out to Lunch” (pp.136-147). At the time Meyerowitz's references were EugËne Atget for the sense of the city, Robert Frank for the suppleness of motions and the keen sociological eye, Edward Hopper for color, and Frederico Fellini for the control of energy, emotions, the play with light and contrast, and the constant slightly satirical eye. One can imagine Meyerowitz more than perfectly at ease, in heaven probably, standing with his camera in the middle of the ballet choreographed by the Italian maestro in 8 1/2 while people are moving in groups to get their glass of mineral water in the gardens of a spa. This early color work by Meyerowitz was all taken on Kodachrome film. It gave his images their contrast, saturated colors, and dark shadows. The low sensitivity of the film then forced the photographer to stand back in order to capture motion without blur. Powell's light and colors have a different quality, one that was born from his use and understanding of modern emulsions. The photographer has reduced the distance between his camera and his subjects; as a result the images and the photographer seem more immersed in the living street; eye contact happens. There is more of an empathic quality in Powell's images. The photographer tends to focus more on one particular pedestrian (it would be a stretch to call the participants in Powell's images “fl‚neurs” as the New York pace definitely does not match Baudelaire's or Benjamin's in the streets of Paris) that he isolates in the crowd, waiting for the decisive moment, for a desired but unexpected epiphany to happen. Powell's images have more sensual, sometimes sexual connotations than Meyerowitz's. The latter stands back; his images focus more on the unexpected and unplanned organization of small groups. The photographer feels the pulse of the street and isolates its rhythms and patterns. It would certainly be interesting to see the two bodies of work on the walls of the same gallery, the Ariel Meyerowitz gallery for instance where Joel Meyerowitz's images from the 1960s will be on show until Jan. 8, 2005 (120, 11th avenue, NYC), a gallery that also represents Gus Powell.