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.
Every afternoon we came back from the streets and edited fast, then filed into the conference room, and Jay would look around and say, who’s first. Nobody wanted to go first. Somebody always did. Up on the screen went the image you’d privately decided, walking back, was the best thing you’d shot all week — and then Jay opened the room before he said a word himself. The critique was honest in a way that had nothing to do with kindness. By the third day you understood the honesty was the gift. He was teaching us to survive being looked at, which turns out to be most of what the work requires.
Light, gesture, and color, he’d say, again and again, until the phrase stopped sounding like instruction and started sounding like a description of what he was made of. He wanted all three in a frame, or he wanted you to know exactly what you’d sacrificed by settling for two. I have one photograph from that week — shot from too far away, cropped down until the edges soften, not sharp in the way a technical judge would want — of a hand caught in dappled light, the fingertips lit as if somebody had switched them on. I didn’t get everything Jay wanted. I got enough of it to understand, years later, what he’d meant.
Be open, was the other one. I want you to have the absolute joy of not knowing what the hell you’re going to find. He said it the way a man says a thing he has proven true so many times that repeating it costs him nothing and might, this once, land on someone new. It landed on me. I’ve carried it since — through a decade of mornings with a camera, and into rooms that have nothing to do with photography at all, where the openness works the same way it did in the Bowery: you don’t know what you’re going to find until you refuse to decide in advance.
He taught one more class after ours. Someone else stood where we stood, under the same flaking word, on the same steps, and then the door closed for good.
What continues is the sentence. Light, gesture, and color. Be open. I say them to myself still, on mornings when nothing has caught my eye yet and I don’t know if anything will. That not-knowing was always the entire point.
Eleven of us stood on those steps once, cameras half-raised, with no idea what we were about to be given.
RIP Jay. You gave us so much…