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 DonaldTrump'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.
Laura Rosen worked as an architectual photographer for a number of years and is currently the archivist with MTA Bridges and Tunnels in New York City. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
