There is a photograph of eleven people standing on the steps of a bank building in the Bowery, in front of a door someone had painted the word PRAY above, years before any of us arrived, in letters already flaking. The steps are covered in graffiti — a cartoon skull in the corner, tags in yellow and white chalk, the kind of accumulated city noise Jay Maisel spent sixty years walking past without walking past, the way the rest of us do. Somebody is holding a camera near their chest, not quite ready. Everyone is squinting. It was overcast, or the light was coming from somewhere none of us had figured out yet.
We didn’t know we were nearly out of time. Jay taught one more workshop after ours. That’s the whole arithmetic of it — we were the second-to-last class in a room that had held forty years of them, and none of us felt the weight of that standing on the steps smiling for somebody’s iPhone.
Inside, the building went up six stories, every one of them hung with prints — decades of Jay’s own choices about what mattered, printed and framed with no apparent order except his.
