Somewhere in an unknown city, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, catches a glimpse of something shiny. He crosses the street and bends down to inspect it.

Somewhere in lower Manhattan Ben Katchor sits at his drawing table. One facet of the jewel of his imagination glimmers. Pen touches paper and once again Julius Knipl is brought to life. Mr. Knipl lives from week to week between the pages of newspapers around the country.

Ben Katchor is an alchemist. He refines the mundane and renders mystery, from base experience he brings forth moments of glory. His picture stories tell us to question the ordinary--that if we think we know life as it is, we should check to see if we're dreaming, for only in sleep do events occur without effect. In real life the hat that blows down the street was worn, was chased, was lost. A torn ticket stub stands for an experience that will last as long as the person who held it.

Julius Knipl lives in a city that is recognizable as Northeast American, Post-Industrial and in decline. Most of the inhabitants have Eastern European Jewish names, as do most of the streets and buildings ("Knipl" is Yiddish for the small nest-egg a housewife keeps in a can in her kitchen). The author was born and raised in Brooklyn. He is only 39, but his picture stories evoke the sights, sounds and even smells of postwar America with a startling, palpable reality. This is an America that the world has passed by.

Unlike our world, in which the company that made the pencil you write with is one and the same with the company that owns the bank you put your money in; where the company that produces the movies also produces the tape they're recorded upon and the machine to play them, in Mr. Knipl's world a human need, regardless of how trivial, is a call to action. It is a place inhabited by quietly brave souls who see niches and rush to fill them. Where one man manufactures the wafers for the "Lady Fingers", another the filling, and yet another prints the box in which they're sold. And each one, doing only what he knows best, builds a life on that, sends his children to school on it, finds security in an unsure universe through it. It is a pre-slickened America, where a person has no second thoughts about putting his clumsy, peasant immigrant's name on the outside of his store, because he can stand by what he sells inside. Ben Katchor is of the world that world gave birth to, and he is its great champion.

It is tempting to force a connection between the author and the hero. You can't mistake the two though. Ben's face has the handsome, finely-chiseled lines of an artist. The people who inhabit Mr. Knipl's city wear the blunt, bold, affectless look of the world-weary. Knowing, but not always wise. Their ankles are heavy.

I once asked Ben if he ever thought about drawing comics on other subjects entirely. He asked what use would it be? If he drew a cowboy, the cowboy would spend his day exploring the back alleys of his frontier town. If he drew an astronaut, the astronaut would somehow find an urban center, inevitably hear a haunting melody drifting on the air, and follow the melody to where strangers are congregating, oblivious to his presence. The subject doesn't seem to be the matter.

And so Mr. Knipl wanders on. Week after week he seeks, discovers, passes--like Moses, the prophet who led the Jews from slavery in Egypt and wandered the desert for 40 years. Some scholars argue that Moses wandered for so long so that his people would forget themselves. Many argue to the contrary. Mr. Knipl is Moses in the urban desert, Moses in a universe of miniatures.

In the bible story Moses stopped once to ascend Mount Sinai and return bearing the Ten Commandments--inscribed in stone by the hand of God, the foundation of all Western ethics. Mr. Knipl's world, too, has its guiding pronouncements: "Detail, detail!", "The polished shine of doctor's plaques, doorknobs and bald heads serve as signs of permanence and reliability", "If it is, someone meant it to be", "a phone booth's location exerts a subtle influence on the person using it".

If Julius Knipl resembles Ben Katchor in any way, it is in his occupation. Just as Mr. Knipl travels in a city that we don't recognize, but somehow know, his occupation is one that we assume must exist--but then, who actually knows a "Real Estate Photographer"? Both he and his creator work necessarily alone. We see Mr. Knipl's solitary frame every week trudging the city streets, his bag strapped across his back. We hear him contract his jobs on pay telephones from people he prefers never to see. He returns at the end of the day to an office he keeps in the "Cheap Merchandise District". A place the feeling of which, not surprisingly, is reiterated in the eighth floor studio that Katchor keeps in a quiet, lower Manhattan business district. His sense of wonder and discovery are too real to imagine that they are not an echo of the author's. For more than that, though, we have to ask ourselves "what is a Real Estate Photographer?" And here is the telling correspondence.

Mr. Knipl's job, his mission, is to render an image of a property on film. His concern with art and society is, at best, incidental to the way he makes his living. He's not an architectural photographer, but a real estate photographer. His job is not necessarily to present his patron with beauty, but with evidence of existence. In this Mr. Knipl's achievement is much the same as Mr. Katchor's. This is a city we don't recognize, but we know. This is philosophy beyond words.

© Words, Inc. Publishing, division, Interfield Corp.

A note about The Plaza Plus.

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