(Larger Image)
|
Manhattan Shores : An Expedition Around Manhattan Island
by Laura Rosen
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Thames & Hudson (1998-09)
ISBN: 050054221X
EAN: 9780500542217
Dewey Decimal #: 974.71043
Hardcover: 159 pages
SKU: 20074
Condition: Used: Like New
Comments: Hardback. Book: As New. Dust Jacket: As New. Book pages clean and crisp with no markings.
|
Editorial Reviews
|
Amazon.com
Anyone who has read Laura Rosen's first book, Top of the City: New York's Hidden Rooftop World, should already be lining up for this one. An architectural photographer of precision and reserve, Rosen also happens to be a stylish writer with an uncanny gift for bringing New York City stones to life. Manhattan Shores is evocative of Paul Goldberger's classic The City Observed in that it is a book about Gotham that puts wings on your feet. You'll want to read it, coordinate your subway and bus maps, or hop on a Circle Line boat, and travel around the edge of the island. From the Bronx to the Battery, Rosen covers the waterfront. Her black-and-white pictures are crystalline and composed, with only a ripple of "human interest" content. The most personal picture is of a white pit bull, posing sphinxlike, on a patch of grass under a "Dog Free Lawn" sign. The rest of the images, from a shot of a lone fisherman on the Battery Park City esplanade to the nosecones of two fighter planes facing off on the deck of the USS Intrepid, have a dignity that borders on grandeur. Rosen often employs a studied symmetry that can make even a quartet of lampposts at the end of East 37th Street seem as impressive and durable as a redwood forest. There is nothing of the snapshot here. And Rosen never leaves us wondering where we are or what we're looking at. She divides Manhattan into 10 sections and writes a one-page introduction to each one that is packed with information. Her captions fill in the rest: "The University Heights Bridge at 207th Street is to the left. The tall buildings at center are River Park Towers in the Bronx." But Rosen never treats the reader like a tourist. "The Little Red Lighthouse and the George Washington Bridge" is enough, and so, for a certain image, that's all she wrote. --Peggy Moorman
|
Book Description
Laura Rosen's first book, the acclaimed Top of the City, introduced readers to an unseen world high above the streets of New York City. Now, in her entrancing new collection of photographs, she takes us on a journey along the hidden edges of the world's most famous island. Over a period of three years, working in all seasons and kinds of weather, she made her way around Manhattan Island with her camera. Manhattan Shores captures a world where landscape and architecture meet in strange and wonderful combinations, a world of decay and transformation, history and neglect, beauty and desecration. Accompanied by Rosen's wryly affectionate, deeply knowledgeable text, this is a book that reveals New York City's past, present, and even its future in a brilliant series of timeless images. Beginning just north of the George Washington Bridge and traveling clockwise through time and space, we pass the site of the last fort in Manhattan to fall to the British in the American Revolution and move through the only natural forest in Manhattan. Beneath a series of glowering industrial-age bridges we find the U.S. Ship Canal, the project that cut off a piece of Manhattan and attached it to the Bronx. We discover old boathouses and derelict boats moldering in the mud of the Harlem River. Sweeping down along the East River we come to the esplanades, and discover private gardens and hidden parks. We pass through Lower Manhattan, where gleaming financial-district skyscrapers dwarf the antique ships of the South Street Seaport Museum, and, rounding the Battery, move uptown past decaying piers, ghosts of the island's once-vibrant waterfront economy. As we move toward our starting point, past Donald Trump's incipient Riverside South mini-city, past the high bluffs of Riverside Park and along a magnificent stretch of the Hudson River, we realize that we have been taken on a visual expedition that only a wonderful, slightly obsessed photographer could have captured. The elegant clarity of Rosen's brilliantly composed photographs have revealed an old city, at once familiar yet always in transformation and utterly new.
|
Customer Reviews
|
Manhattan: coast to coast
Rating  (5)
Date: 2005-07-05
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Who better to cover the Manhattan's edge than Laura Rosen? As an architectural photographer she knows what to look for and delivers too. No soft focus, angled shots or wastage, just beautiful compositions that work in this tour round Manhattan.
I can't do better than the description of the photos in the Editorial Reviews above but I can add that the design of the book is excellent. The six chapters all start with a text page full of historical and contemporary detail followed by a photo centered on each page with its own caption (how refreshing not have to keep turning to a back page for a caption as plenty of art photo books insist) and printed in 200dpi on quality paper. A nice touch is a simple foldout map at the front of the book naming many of the places shown in the photos.
If you live in New York this lovely book is a great reminder of what the local coastline looks like.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
|
|
|