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À la sauvette.
The man stepping out from behind the curving metal is looking away, his head slightly tilted back in exhilaration or relief. The displacement of his gaze gives the photograph an air of the illicit: the surreptitious exposure of one caught unaware at a moment of vulnerability. His hair is immaculately coiffed, his double-breasted suit jacket buttoned, which only serve to draw attention to the incongruity of his hands still zipping his fly as he steps out of the public toilet. At the same time, there is a certain insouciance to his attitude, for he seems well aware that he has crossed the threshold of the urinal: he is deliberately daring us to look. In the photo, we cannot see past his hands, but that imagined opening is echoed by the space between his legs and by his parted lips in a manner that seems to capture in a rigorous interplay of forms a broader insight about the pissotière as a construction unique to Parisian street life. This toilet is a "convenience" designed to provoke as much as to assuage, in a disturbing confluence of the shame of private male bodily necessity and the conventions of public display.
The photograph is dominated by iron, as though the toilet were a rampart or barricade, and yet its predominance emphasizes its porosity: the features designed to ventilate the edifice-the fleurs-de-lys cut-outs distributed at eye level, the open roof and shin-high gap at the base-ironically seem to invite the stray glance in, or out. In other words, the illicit is built into the architectural form of the pissotière itself, rather than a fleeting conjuncture in this scene. The blatant joke of the photograph is its visual pun between two kinds of display, erotic and commercial. The outsized, serpentine tongue in the Krema poster (its curve reverberating in the lily petals and the elongated "l" of Le meilleur) is at once an index and a fetish, pointing outrageously to the man's crotch while standing in for what is not there. It is only appropriate that Krema is a French confectioner especially known for licorice caramel candies whose milky sweetness conceals a sting of anise.
By the wayside.
The photograph is intriguing in its own right, but what...