Chance Meeting,

ca. 1940–41

<p> Lewis’s prints of everyday life in New York often carry an emotional charge, achieved through dramatic lighting effects and a careful composition of figures. In the nighttime <em>Chance Meeting</em>, a woman, backlit against a storefront, encounters a man cast in oblique light. Despite the distance between the figures and their separation by a newspaper stand, their torsos arc toward each other as if being pulled together. The daytime<em> Sunday Garden Inspection</em>, by contrast, shows a young family standing in their yard, with gazes cast downward at their shadows on the lawn. The staid garden inspectors have little of the dynamic potential of <em>Chance Meeting</em>’s protagonists. Is something amiss between them? Or perhaps they are just disappointed with their garden’s yield, figured in a few tiny hatch marks at bottom left. </p>