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In 1988, Kathy Shorr had just graduated from the School for Visual Arts with a B.F.A. in photography and was looking for new material to shoot. For her thesis, on ballroom dance, she had gone to dance studios all around New York, and she wanted to find another subject that would let her spend time with people, immersed in their environment—preferably something that would afford her a salary. She thought that she might drive a taxi, because she loved driving. But she realized that customers would be rushing in and out of the car, and the rides would be too short to take more than a couple of photos. So she decided to try chauffeuring a limousine instead.
Shorr got a job at a limo company in Red Hook, Brooklyn. “It was not a fancy place,” she told me recently. As a woman, and a young one, she was a novelty among her co-workers, men who drove as a career. Passengers were always surprised to see her, but not unpleasantly so. She started in the spring, the high season, and worked weekends, shuttling celebrants to proms, weddings, quinceañeras, and one lesbian commitment ceremony in the West Village; she stocked the car’s bar herself. “About an hour into the drive, I would say, ‘Oh, excuse me, I’m a photographer,’ ” Shorr recalled; would it be all right if she photographed her passengers for the rest of the trip? Save for one man, who was concerned about being recognized—“He was pretending to be an important person,” Shorr said—everyone agreed. She told her subjects that she hoped to make a book of the pictures. Now, thirty-six years later, she has: “Limousine,” which was published in November by Lazy Dog Press.
Shorr shot in black-and-white, with a Nikon, often leaning through the partition that divided the driver from the driven during stops, so that the back of the car became a de-facto photo booth. From the moment that she announced her creative intentions to her subjects, she told me, “the whole dynamic of control and power in the car changed.” The passengers had hired her to work, unobtrusively, for them: “Suddenly, I became the person they were working for.” Some soaked up the limelight. Here is a beaming bridesmaid, lovely in a spaghetti-strap sheath dress and lace gloves, posing by the Bailey Fountain, at Grand Army Plaza; for a moment, she becomes the focus of the day, as the bride lingers behind. And here is a couple locked in a passionate embrace, the man pressing the woman into the car’s bench seat as if they are starring in a film noir about forbidden desire. Actually, they were teen-agers, on their way to prom. When Shorr asked if she could shoot them kissing, they were more than happy to oblige.
A limousine is a kind of set; to enter one is to play a role, even without a camera present. “When people come into the car, everybody is dressed up, and you take on a new persona when you dress fancy,” Shorr told me. “Your behavior and manner are very different than if you’re just going out in jeans or sweats with the same people. Your persona elevates. But, as time goes by, your real personality comes out.” Look at Shorr’s photo of a trio of bridesmaids pressed together on the car’s back bench, having a drink in the middle of the afternoon, relaxing on their way to the reception. The one by the window has just taken a pull on her cigarette; dress bunched up around her knees, she looks away from Shorr’s camera, having briefly put away her public face.
“Limousine” offers a delightful time-capsule view of a bygone era in fashion—hair teased to the heavens, satin dresses with tight hips and big puffed shoulders, acid-washed jeans rolled at the cuff—and of a bygone New York, too. Most of the people whom Shorr photographed were working-class Brooklynites, as was she. This was the era of corporate raiders, greed-is-good Wall Street ambitions, Trump Tower. The limousine was seen as an accessory to such ostentatious wealth, but it was affordable to rent one, especially with a group; it represented, Shorr told me, “the idea that you, as a working-class person, could live or act like a rich person, if only for a day.” One of Shorr’s photos shows a group of young men in bow ties who look like they might be bond traders. They lounge with their legs up, confidently meeting the camera’s gaze. They are ushers at a wedding, on the way from Brooklyn to a reception in the Bronx. “They were the kind of guys I grew up with,” Shorr recalled. “They were very, very polished. Their clothes were impeccable; their hair was just right. And they were playing with the dynamic of me being a woman and them being men, you know, a flirtatious kind of thing. They got into that pose; they just worked with me. I know they gave me a very nice tip.”
The limousine, in “Limousine,” is not a mark of élitism, but a great equalizer. Shorr drove, and photographed, people of all races, ethnicities, customs. “It was approachable,” Shorr said—not like a black car, which might signal the presence of a businessman or some other important person not to be bothered. “It had much more of a people’s kind of feeling.” When her long Lincoln rolled into a neighborhood, everyone from kids to elderly ladies would come over to look inside. The subjects of one photo, a casually dressed couple with their young son nestled between them, weren’t passengers of hers at all. Shorr was parked on Ocean Parkway, her car empty, and they asked if they could come sit inside to feel what it was like.
Shorr grew up in Bushwick, in an intergenerational house with her brothers, her parents, her grandparents, and her great-grandparents. She got her interest in driving from her maternal grandmother, the only person in the family who owned a car. She chauffeured the limo for nine months, and got so good at maneuvering it that she could parallel park on a city street, as she did one night when she dropped off a client at Lincoln Center and went to Lincoln Plaza Cinemas to see “Babette’s Feast” before she was due back for pickup. “I had a foot in both worlds,” she told me, of that time in her life. “I could relate totally to the people that I was driving. But I also had just graduated from school, and I was a different person.” The subjects of her photographs are on their way to new lives, too: growing up, graduating, getting married. “Limousine” is, in a sense, a family album, though it connects people whose paths never consciously crossed. Its subjects don’t share genes or a name. What they have in common is an important moment spent in the back of a special, celebratory car, preserved, forever, by a stranger’s camera.
Sourse: newyorker.com