If you want to know why new york City can survive anything you throw at it, one good place to start is the Louis Faurer retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In the 1940s and '50s, when Faurer roamed the streets with his 35-mm camera, New York was already a cyclotron for every human impulse. The saintly and the unsanitary spun around at high speed. In his pictures the city was a place of immigrant bustlers. Raw bloodlines howl from their faces. The streets were full of plump, sexy cars, carnal Fords and pontoon-fendered Buicks. By some reports Faurer could be a difficult, saturnine man. But he had a gift for seizing thunderbolts from New York's crackling air. He made just a handful of great pictures, but in them you find the city we still know-so intricate in mood, so darkly complicated that it's plainly vulnerable. Invincible too.
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