Joel Meyerowitz's 1978 photograph from his Empire State series captures the paradox of urban monumentality: making the monumental almost invisible. The Empire State Building rises not as main subject but as punctuation, its crown catching late afternoon light while the real drama unfolds at street level.

Meyerowitz turns his attention to the flanking architecture, to commercial facades that have become honest witnesses of city life. Red brick and pale stone frame the view with theatrical precision. A glowing street lamp, a jutting Broadway sign, and candid storefronts create a layered stage. The vintage car at the curb anchors the scene in a specific, vanished New York.

Light and color drive the image. Meyerowitz reserves chromatic intensity for the surrounding buildings: warm masonry, cool crevices of shadow, a faintly blue sky. The restrained palette—champagne limestone, dusty salmon brick, steel-toned air—gives the photograph documentary clarity and quiet lyricism. Here, light itself is the true subject.

By the late 1970s, Meyerowitz had already committed fully to color, challenging a still-dominant belief that serious photography belonged in black and white. His conviction that color carries its own intelligence is evident in the burnished glow on stone, the reflections flickering in windows, the exacting depiction of signage; all would lose force in grayscale.

In this picture, the Empire State functions more as organizing axis than celebrity monument, a vertical accent slicing through horizontal planes of street and cornice. Rather than chase the postcard view, Meyerowitz reveals that New York’s grandeur lies in ordinary structures seen with unusual attentiveness. The city appears worn yet dignified, its age recorded in soot, signage and stone, not in spectacle.

The photograph belongs to Meyerowitz's broader project: affirming color as a vehicle for serious seeing and discovering beauty in the patient observation of light over everyday surfaces. It suggests that careful looking is a quiet form of devotion, and that a city does not need its icons front and center to declare its presence.