One-Man Museum Without Walls

By Paul Gray

A street photographer sells splendid $6.00 visions of New York

The ocean liner QE 2 glides past the World Trade Center: elegant horizontal meeting towering verticals. The late afternoon sun lends pale, reflected fire, while the rest of the sky fills up with lowering clouds. How fortunate that Photographer George Forss, 40, happened to be there with his camera when all this happened. More fortunate still, Forss sells 11-in. by 14-in. copies of this photograph, exquisitely printed and carefully matted, for only $6.

The price is easy; finding Forss is something else again. The line forms somewhere in Manhattan. He is a street vendor, one of about 7,500 who pay New York City $25 a year for a license to sell their wares on the sidewalk. No one knows how many more ply the same trade illegally, or how much of their merchandise "fell off a truck," i.e., was stolen. But marketplaces are in plain view nearly everywhere. Weather permitting, and especially on fine spring days, certain blocks in midtown and the Wall Street area take on the pace and color of oriental bazaars. Shoppers can buy anything from hot dogs to fake diamonds without ever going through a door.

Amid all this pitching, hawking and haggling stands Forss, a bearish, balding man with a neatly trimmed beard. His photographs rest on the sidewalk, propped against an available building. They do their own selling; Forss merely watches while passers-by stop to look. They see remarkable things: a velvety image of a contemplative black child, a serene study of a well-fed cat and an undernourished house plant. The much photographed Verrazano Bridge can be found in Forss's display, but this time with a small starburst of sunlight piercing one of its uprights. And, yes, there is a winter scene in Central Park, rendered as a child with a very experienced eye might see it: the snow white, the background buildings dark and brooding.

Wherever Forss sets up his fine black-and-white prints, he creates a little museum without walls; such is his skill behind the lens and his technical proficiency in the darkroom. The police, however, see Forss and his fellow vendors as nuisances. Leaseholding, rent-paying merchants think still less of them. So, even with a license, Forss cannot go about his business entirely unhassled. Because of congestion, some busy corners are forbidden territory. There are other restrictions. "You're not supposed to stay in one place more than two hours," he says, adding that the police grow unhappy if the same vendor appears at the same locale too regularly. A technical infraction of one of the city's many complex regulations can always be invoked, and a bust may follow: "If you're unlicensed, the motorcycle cop holds you till the truck comes. Then they take your stuff and hold it all day long at the precinct, until business hours are over. On top of going to court and paying the fines, you get charged $65 for gas and fees for the truck."

If life sounds hard, Forss describes it with the abstract air of a man in love with his work. Besides, his knockabout past has immunized him to mere annoyances. Born in the South Bronx, Forss endured a bout of polio at age three, and the loss of his carpenter father, who took to thievery, using a hand-carved wooden pistol, and was deported back to Sweden after a fling at bank robbery. His Italian mother remarried, and George moved through a series of orphanages and boys' homes. "Let's face it," he says, "we were a welfare family." At 18, he struck out on his own, taking jobs as a house painter, Linotype operator, busboy and messenger. He began carrying a camera with him, learning about it and the city at the same time: "You get ideas while you're walking around." He taught himself darkroom techniques and started showing the results to people he met on his rounds. Some offered to buy. Five years ago, Forss decided to sell full time.

"I'm a peddler," he says, and his prices reflect the rigid economics of the street-vending trade. Those who cannot clear $100 per working day should look for an office job. Forss figures he spends $1.65 to develop each print. Though he throws out a good many because they do not meet his standards, he still has 40 prints to sell each day, at "a fair profit" of around $4 apiece. On good days, he does just that. When it rains or snows, or when the police grow especially attentive, business suffers.

Forss calls his existence "living off the land in modern life," and he is clearly not in it for the money. Precarious as the sidewalk trade may be, he still feels free to take a week off with his cameras and haunt the urban landscape, waiting and looking for a particular shot--the confluence, say, of the liner and the towers --that seems worth saving. Selling his own work gives him quality control and a flexible schedule, but Forss barely notices the potential customers who cluster around his display. He keeps looking at the light and wondering whether it is striking a building or bridge in a way that might look good on film. He takes out-of-body trips to favorite shooting sites. "I've got spots all over the city," he says. He checks his urge to visit one immediately with a thought: "The buildings aren't going anywhere."

But they are. Forss's birthplace in the South Bronx, for instance: "My neighborhood's not there any more. It's underground; it's bricks." Wealthier areas of the city decay and change less rapidly, but even the center of Manhattan is a mobile of concrete, stone and steel. The camera's lens fixes the flux. When the eye behind it is guided with sufficient knowledge, a magical transformation can happen: a permanent image supersedes its transient subject. It is hard to put a value on such an event, although $6 seems a little low. What George Forss is selling on the sidewalks is slices of a city's soul. --By Paul Gray

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