The Manhattan Street Corners project

Photograph © Richard Howe

Richard Howe, who came to digital photography fairly late in his career as an artist, has nonetheless  done what no other photographer has had the temerity to do before: photograph each and every of the 10,937 street corners on the island of Manhattan. On his website you can view all of the pictures he took of 10th Avenue from 13th Street to 218th street. But to get a real feel of the project, I recommend having a look at the "101 Street Corners Sampler."

What you might first notice from flipping through these galleries is how comfortingly pedestrian the streets of New York really look: here are old women shopping, bunches of teenagers coming home from school, block after block of undistinguished buildings. There is little Times Square razzle-dazzle in evidence, this is a city of people going about daily life. But then you come across a photograph of something like the vacant building at the corner of  Spring and Mulberry Elizabeth streets that served as a spectacular showcase for graffiti artists and realize that the in New York the mundane is pretty wonderful. As Richard says in his introduction to the project,

Each of Manhattan’s street corners is a life-world of its own, representing the common experience of the daily lives that cross it; taken together, they represent the collective experience of the island’s streets and sidewalks, the larger life-world of Manhattan’s greatest public commons.

The whole collection will be available in 2009 and you can buy individual prints now—in fact, the Library of Congress has four in its permanent collection.

Of all 10,937 photographs available, I chose the one at the top of the post because it makes a nice introduction to NYRB's new  location—that's right, we've just moved to Greenwich Village. We're not actually located in the White Horse Tavern, but we aren't too far away.

Before we packed up the old place, I took a picture of one of my favorite relics of the old, old office. I had a feeling that this desk organizer, which likely dated from the 60s, wouldn't survive the move. It features a sticker that reads (or read) what I'm guessing is "Berrigan for Pope." But which Berrigan? Daniel? Phil? Perhaps a dual papacy?

Comments

[Alan]

The Street Corners is a magnificent achievement mixing art, history, anthropolgy, and philosophy. Here we have a true phenomenology of the life world of New York City as seen through the lens of Richard's camera, and now available to all.