Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE NEW YORKER

THE New York face! There is no face like it in the world. It is
a mixture of Frenzy and Barter, Power and Servility. It is at once
a threat and a promise. In a word, a composite creation, embodying
the spirit of the Great Republic.
If poetry is the expression of the hunger for Elsewhere, the New York
face is the epiphany of the eternal Here and Now, believed in and conquered,
a Here and Now worth so much cash-down on the counter, a Here and Now
that is to be haggled for and swapped.
It is a concrete face, a face that believes in “doing things,” a face that
never procrastinates except on a “sure tip,” a face without irony, a face
without tears, a face that has just enough imagination to wreck a railroad
or outgeneral a political adversary on the Field of the Cloth of Yellow.
It has something of the sublime in it—this New Face in the world. There
is something inexorable in the way the New Yorker walks, the way he talks,
the way he looks at a real estate possibility out in boggy Queens. His walk
has been called a swagger in the American provinces, but the swagger is the
swagger of Juggernaut, not the swagger of the professional “bluffer.”
I would call the New Yorker sublime because he never counts his losses—
or other people’s. He is an unconscious fatalist. And this fatalism always
carries in it the germ of the sublime, and it has passed into the face and man-
ner of its beneficiary—or victim. Points of view differ.
The typical New Yorker is as unscrupulous as a plumber. This trait,
Philistia to the contrary notwithstanding, adds to the dignity of his counten-
ance. “Get the goods, but don’t be caught with them on you” is his text.
It is in his face. It is not a smug, hypocritical face, but one that looks up at
you boldly and pronounces those immortal words of Richard Croker—or
were they Tweed’s words—“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Brazenness is in itself not to be condemned. In New York it is a neces-
sary ingredient of success. You see it in the face of the Tammany politician,
the Wall-street broker, the hotel manager, the subway director. Brazenness
has been evolved in the struggle for existence in this chaos called Manhattan
and it sits there in our faces by divine right. It is an asset. It will cow the
world in time.
Ah! This is all a terrific indictment of our public men, or, rather of our
public Face, the public may say. Not at all. It is a description of what the
eye sees. It is a notorious face—this New York face—but it is a great face,
for in it there are the traits that mould great empires and found oversea com-
mercial and political kingdoms. Such empires and kingdoms are never
fashioned by the soft hand or the weakly honest face.
The New York face! By its very brutality shall it conquer, its moral
defects shall contribute its aureole.
It is a rough-cast of America-that-shall-be.
Benjamin De Casseres.

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