The Inspiration of Mose Cafe Throughout the Years
Throughout the years of taking photos and being able to share my enthusiasm for photography, I have never had such an emotional response to an image as I have to one black and white photograph I took over 20 years ago. During this time, I was just an amateur photographer and the result of the impact of this image defies the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”
I have been asked quite a bit about the origin of this photograph called ¨Moses Cafe.¨ Through the years people from New York to as far away as Norway have shared their stories about this image. I was just 19 and took a college summer trip to Greece and the Middle East including Egypt and Israel. While walking in the old city of Jerusalem in the West Bank, I saw a man and a woman relaxing on their hotel balconies. The man leaning back on his chair looked as if he had had a long day, and the woman was reading a book and enjoying her immunity from her stressful every day life. Probably within an hour of that day, there was a shooting within blocks, but I didn´t find out until later that evening. As a teenager, we are fearless, immune to the fear that something bad can happen to us. Later on that trip, my film camera was stolen and I lost all the other images. This is what remained.
While living in New York City some years later, I submitted the image to a poster company and they made a limited edition of 500 posters which were later placed in various stores in the USA. I remember visiting my university bookstore at Boston University in Kenmore Square and seeing it there. I felt a tiny inkling of success…
Of the stories I have heard, my favorite is from a fireman in Brooklyn, New York. He told me that during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, his wife was able to grab their ¨Moses Cafe¨ poster while their house was being flooded, but it had gotten damaged. He wanted to surprise her for her birthday with a new print. She did get a beautiful archival fine-art print!
Another man from the southern part of Norway recently asked me if the image was taken in Spain or Venice as he and his wife ¨may want to go there for a holiday to find out if it is still like the picture.¨ How in the world did the poster get to Norway?
Lastly, I remember a young teenager from New Jersey who had the poster hanging in her English classroom. She wrote a poem inspired by the photograph on her blog in 2000 when blogs didn´t really exist. She was looking for me to place a photo on her site. I reached out to her.
As I studied the Art of Photography at university, I am reminded how the precise moment is imperative to ¨getting the shot.¨ This image was taken horizontally and vertically, but it was just that moment and the vertical position which lined up the symmetry needed to evoke a sense of harmony between the two people and the building. As the master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson stated, “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
For any image taken in the past, you also need to take things into context that it was taken in 1989 — the age of film — no digital cameras, retouching or manipulation.
It is exalting that one image can touch so many. That is the beauty of photography. Thank you.
— Lori Needleman
