Review: Stephen Wilkes’s Jay Myself Finds Beauty in an Emptied Landscape

Since 1967, a six-story former bank building in the Bowery neighborhood in Lower Manhattan has served as the studio, home, gallery, and storage space for renowned photographer Jay Maisel. The intervening decades have seen the once-squalid Bowery, which was at one time primarily populated by bohemian artists, the working poor, and the homeless, become gentrified beyond recognition. In 2015, massively increasing property taxes finally forced Maisel, one of the neighborhood’s last holdouts, to cave and sell his 35,000 square-foot property for $55 million, the largest private real estate deal in Manhattan history.

While issues of gentrification and the ensuing transformation of a dynamic neighborhood that birthed many an artist’s career certainly lie on the periphery of Jay Myself, director Stephen Wilkes narrows his gaze to the remarkable array of oddities strewn about the Germania Bank building’s vast interior and the singular man who’s long been accumulating them. In touring Maisel’s labyrinthine 72-room abode and shuffling through a half-century’s worth of items, Wilkes unveils an otherworldly space that functions as both an externalization of Maisel’s wildly eccentric personality and a bastion of creativity in a neighborhood whose rough edges have been slowly and completely sanded down over the years.

Walking the paper-thin line between hoarding and collecting, Maisel has amassed everything from old bottles and typewriters to tools, batteries, and thousands of Kodachrome slides. One room inside the Germania Bank building is dedicated solely to objects of a single color, another to all things circular, and yet another to objects whose form or shape Maisel finds interesting. The building is a magnificent and often vexing repository of junk, a manifestation of the saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But as Maisel walks us through his overstuffed palace, pontificating on the value of objects in and of themselves, his seemingly random and excessive collection of bric-a-brac is revealed as an integral part of his uncanny ability to perceive beauty in the mundane. It’s not for nothing, after all, that he became one of the most esteemed, influential photographers of his generation.

“What I’m trying to do all the time is to try and see things anew…the way a child would see them,” Maisel says before walking over to and playing a set of bells handmade from old pans and scrap metal. His incessant playfulness isn’t only inextricably linked to his obsessive collecting, but lies at the very core of his artistic vision, informing the way he looks at, and in turn photographs, the world around him. What appears as banal, even to fellow artist and mentee Wilkes, is magical and full of wonder to Maisel. When Wilkes asks him why he has a whole drawer of these screws, Maisel coyly counters, “Aren’t they beautiful?”

Constantly chomping away on a cigar and seemingly always with a salty retort or sharp observation at the ready, Maisel suggests a comical amalgamation of William Friedkin and Marlon Brando. And while his limitless curiosity and innumerable idiosyncrasies make him a perfect subject for a documentary, Jay Myself becomes all the more intriguing in depicting this otherwise implacable artist as he finds himself at a truly challenging crossroads. Maisel isn’t a man prone to displays of emotion, and when Wilkes asks him how he feels about having to massively downsize his collection and leave the home and neighborhood within which he created all of his greatest artistic work, he brusquely responds, “How do you think I feel?”

Maisel’s emotional pitch is frequently tough to get a read on, yet as the final boxes are loaded up, the sense of his impending loss, and the pain of seeing a once vibrant source of inspiration lay virtually empty, is fully palpable. But as his inevitable exit draws near, Maisel doesn’t shed a tear. Instead, he uses the almost completely vacant space as the grounds for a freshly conceived photo shoot. The empty interior of the Germania Bank building may now, like the Bowery itself, be rendered unrecognizable, but Maisel’s unique vision persists as he still finds beauty even when his surroundings have seemingly been drained of it.