OK, now, how do I get the R and the L to turn upside down like Powerhouse did for the title of this book—must be one of those hidden corners of the Word software world, or a design trick…and what do you get when you multiply “twirl” by “run”…

Oh, sorry. I was just mulling about Jeff Mermelstein’s book, trying to recreate its carefully considered spine and cover graphics at the head of my piece. One could say I was in a twirling moment, or, as Laurie Anderson said in “Language is a Virus,” “I saw this guy on the train/And he seemed to gave gotten stuck/In one of those abstract trances.” Believe me, I know those trances, and getting out of one can be like waking from sleepwalking—startling and disorienting.




What startles and disorients me about Mermelstein’s images here is that for a set of work that aspires to be instantaneous and unforced, its looseness countermands the typical “take no prisoners, accept no substitutes” machismo of Manhattan street photography. (An attitude reinforced by his comments in James Estrin’s December 3rd article in the New York Times, that “Ordinarily [Mermelstein] will torture himself to ensure that each individual picture is better than anything that's come before.”) It comes across as controlled, tight, humorless, and very heady. Work that would have been thrown out of a Winogrand/Meyerowitz/Papageorge crit session in the early 1980s for lack of oomph has been assembled here in a structure that, while not without its conceptual intrigues, leaves me wondering “where’s the beef” (to make another eighties allusion)? Maybe TWIRL / RUN should be read as revisionist history, or as an exercise in reevaluating archives for the sake of street photography’s hidden psychoses.



When a train is bearing down on you, do you freeze or move? Either way, a spectacle is created, in which the fight/flight, or twirl/run drama assumes center stage. A highly accomplished photographer who has found wondrous, not overly-worked-looking moments published in two previous monographs, Mermelstein is no on-rushing train; the men and women (no male twirlers, but both sexes run) he photographed have, for the most part, no apparent awareness of him, so we can’t tie their actions to his. Lacking that catalyst, then, we are stuck with a randomness that is teasingly enigmatic, coupled with appreciation for someone who has walked the streets and collected these moments long enough (over a decade at least) to have complementary archives of disconnected moments. Perfectly in character in the target-rich streets of New York, and very few other places would offer these moments to even the most attentive photographers. My issue, I guess, is that I’m just as happy thinking about this book and admiring its cover (love the green foil inserts) as I am looking at the pictures it elegantly embraces. And by its spotlighting actions, the book elevates them, perhaps higher than they deserve. —George Slade