With Jay Myself, first-time director Stephen Wilkes has made a film that, much like the latest revisionist history from movie veteran Quentin Tarantino, wistfully captures the end of an era in a changing metropolis. This taut documentary profiles photographer Jay Maisel (the film’s title is an example of a misaddressed letter, and it also serves as a guide to pronunciation), but it’s also the story, albeit an incomplete one, of a historic New York building that evaded developers for decades.
Maisel sums up his aesthetic as simply, “Hey look!” Better than nearly any other film about a photographer, Jay Myself gets at what makes its subject’s eye tick—which, long story short, is everything. Maisel collects images but also collects things; anything that casts a certain light and color, anything that demonstrates variations of color and sometimes just things whose shape he likes and thinks he can make use of later. Near the end of the film, as he’s talking to director Wilkes, a one-time student and longtime friend who has known Maisel since 1979, the elder shutterbug points out several potential shots just in the view from his longtime home.
Of course, that home is a big part of his great view, and it has enabled him to hold on to anything and everything that has inspired him. And that home is what spurred Wilkes to make this film. For years, New Yorkers and visitors alike may have been perplexed by a once-glorious edifice that stands at 190 Bowery; six stories high, the elegant but outwardly dilapidated structure (at least as it appeared just a few years ago) looks like a remnant from another time, and it is. Construction began on what was originally known as the Germania Bank Building at the end of the 19th century. Passersby often assumed the building was abandoned, a prime piece of real estate that had somehow escape the greedy talons of developers.
In fact, this elegant dinosaur was home to Maisel, his wife and daughter Amanda. Maisel lucked into the building in 1966, purchasing it for just over 100 grand. That money got him 35,000 square feet, 72 rooms and space to do whatever he wanted. Which included gallery space; and an indoor basketball court; and seemingly infinite storage. The upkeep proved too much, and finally he sold the building in 2015 for a keen $55 million.
Jay Myself chronicles Maisel and his staff as he starts packing up decades of his life and gets ready to move out. As his daughter Amanda points out, the building is one of the last examples of a New York that’s disappearing, a sprawling, idiosyncratic beast that doesn’t really make sense but that inspires creatives and allows them to thrive. Maisel made it work, with cushy commercial gigs everywhere from Life magazine to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, all the while maintaining a distinct and vivid aesthetic while making as much money as he could from it. Still, it wasn’t enough to keep going with yearly upkeep running some $300,000 a year.
Wilkes is perhaps too close to his subject to ask any tough questions. After all, the director is paying homage to a mentor and a longtime friend. Yet with its bins full of Kodachrome slides (and titles that mimic the film stock’s vintage color scheme and design), Jay Myself is also about the shift away from analog formats. After decades of shooting on film, Maisel now shoots digitally. Nobody makes note of this in the film, but that too is part of its tone of inevitable change. This touching, eye-popping documentary could well have been called, Once Upon a Time … on the Bowery. It’s a must-see for photographers, and for anyone who’s wanted a look inside that majestic corner building.
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