Jay Masiel: You Can Bank on His Photographs

Jay Myself (2019)

Directed by Stephen Wilkes

Mind Hive Films, 79 minutes, Not-rated (language)

★★★★

When I was in high school, I went to New York City on my senior class trip. I recall that we took a Grey Line bus tour of Gotham’s highlights. Though I didn’t think much about it at the time, one of the “sights” was a trip through the Bowery where, from the comfort of our seats, we gawked at winos, drunks, and junkies passed out on slabs of cardboard. Yeah­–that was pretty pathetic in retrospect.

I wish that the bus had swung by the old Germania Bank. It would have been neat to see what photographer Jay Maisel (b. 1931) was in the process of doing. In 1966, Maisel bought the building for just $102,000–all six floors of it. For the next 50 years the 72-room, 35,000 square foot fading Bowery rockpile was Maisel’s home, gallery, studio, and warehouse. By 2014, it cost over $300,000 per year to maintain his domain (repairs, utilities, taxes, salaries, etc.) hence Maisel sold it for a staggering $55 million. He quips that in the years he lived in the bank he had no money but lived as if he did, and now he has money and lives as if he doesn’t.

Stephen Wilkes’s directorial debut sheds light on Maisel, his work, and his move to a 10,000 square foot studio/home in Brooklyn. It is said that there is no eccentric like a British eccentric. That may be true, but crusty New Yorkers can give them a run for their money. Maisel is cut from Jimmy Breslin/Pete Hamill cloth. Salty language is Maisel’s everyday discourse and he’s seldom seen without a cigar clinched in his teeth. His images not withstanding, some of the documentary’s most stunning frames are of Maisel sitting in shadow lighting a stogie, his face going from dark to light to dark–warm orange glows fading to black and back again.

This is appropriate for a film about Jay Maisel. Although his most famous shot is probably a black and white image of Miles Davis blowing his horn as if there was no tomorrow, in my estimation Masiel’s most striking images are those bathed in vivid colors. He has an eye for strong contrast–saturated yellow bleeding into rich orange, a blue pants-clad figure dragging a rope past a deep red wall, and hot reds and cool blues as backdrops for silhouetted figures. Gray Line presented the Bowery as hellishly exotic, but it was Maisel’s playground. Although he did commission work around the globe, many of Maisel’s images were taken in his neighborhood. He spent time on the street but also on the rooftop where he produced bird’s eye perspectives of the street and people. Today, skid row is giving way to investors and hipsters. Maisel’s images are a Bowery documentary in their own right, which gives Wilkes’s documentary a meta tint.

Numerous professional photographers appear on the screen to talk about why Maisel is an acknowledged master of our time, but Greg Heisler summed it best when he said that Maisel’s work is about “the joy of seeing.” Maisel underscores this by picking up an object or peering out the window and rhetorically asking, “How can anyone not see that?” Well… most don’t and that’s what makes Maisel’s work special.

Wilkes was once one of Maisel’s interns and the two have genuine affection for each other. This peeks through the veneer of detachment that both men try to exude. In Maisel’s case, it’s a New Yorker’s affection made manifest by a pulled punch not a landed one, and a bemused hint of a smile when he answers a question that first induces a few swears. Here’s the other thing about Maisel: his bank building was choked full–and I mean full–of found objects, scavenged junk, scraps, and castoff building materials–that caught his eye for reasons not even he can always articulate. One is tempted to think “hoarder” when suddenly he picks up a pane of wavy green-tinted glass and holds it against another object. Snap! A great photo.

Imagine emptying 35,000 square feet of clutter, building material, props, photo lights, printers, and untold numbers of framed images. It took 35 trucks to haul it away, with Maisel lording over the decision of what to pitch, what to store, and what to move. That process was sometimes surreal. He tosses a wall full of unopened Kodak film, yet hastily assembles old VHS cases into a pattern, declares, “There’s a photo,” and tells the crew the cardboard cases must be saved.

Maisel’s wife and daughter also appear in the film. One is tempted to nominate each for sainthood until we realize they are quite capable of taking care of themselves. It might be fun living with such an offbeat genius, but Maisel is also such a contrarian that I longed for a bit more exploration of his tics and orneriness and less on the contrivance of whether or not he will make his moving deadline. At 79 minutes, though, Jay Myself gives us just enough to appreciate the subject without making us reach for a cudgel. Maisel poses the question of what do we prefer: a photograph or photographing. For Maisel it’s the act of shooting which, for him, is a form of New York Zen: moments in which the world and its problems briefly disappear. The film skirts the edge of hagiography, but viewing it will alter how you see.

Rob Weir