Spaans, Peter – New York from the Yards(sold)

€95,00

Author: Anneke Oele
Publisher: Self- Publishing
Year: 1986
ISBN:x

Softcover. Handprinted slkscreens and offset. Tall square quarto. 30 x 30 cm, 84 pages. Limited to 150 copies (of which there are 50 copies in cloth). 
Condition:cover has signs of use, interior is good


Photographically illustrated artist's book with 50 black-and-white images shot from eight of New York's rail yards. (There are also 6 drawings, and two photographic abstractions.) 
Exceptional photographs of mid-eighties New York subway and rail yards, overpasses, train tracks, and the surrounding architecture of these rather forlorn neighborhoods. Ahead of its time conceptually.
Over the course of several visits in 1984-1985, Peter Spaans was granted access by the MTA to photograph inside eight of New York City's subway storage and transfer yards. Whether in the Bronx, Jamaica, or Coney Island, the resulting images of empty trains, housing projects, and vast swaths of urban decay represent snapshots usually glimpsed from grimy elevated subway windows in the outer boroughs, or from cars while being whisked to an airport, a beach, or a ball game. They are not places one ordinarily stops to admire the scenery.Similar to the Becher's Düsseldorf School, Spaans' photographs have a feeling on the surface of detachment and cold documentation. There are few people and few signs of life. New York from the Yards could easily be seen as a topographical study of an anonymous city, employing a similar philosophy as the German photographers. Yet Spaans' images are quintessentially New York. His focus on the marginalia of a city still firmly rooted in the pre-Giuliani era exudes a strange romance, almost a spell, that only this city can provide. 

Out of stock