44 Field trip
The island at the centre of the world See New York come alive in this photographic history of the city as there a city more suited to photography, than New York? The invention of the art form coincided almost exactly with the city’s expansion in the mid19th Century, a period that saw it go from far-away colonial outpost to the capital of the world. Whether it was the countless ethnic groups and nationalities that flooded through Ellis Island and never got further than the Lower East Side or the skyscrapers of downtown that relentlessly devoured each other up until the 1970s, New York has always provided photographers with an endless array of subject matter. No book has ever demonstrated this better (to our knowledge at least) than Taschen’s New York: Portrait of a City. Beginning with the earliest known snap of the city (taken in the 1840s) through to the mass immigration of the 1900s, Cotton Club-era Harlem and the devastation of September 11, 2001 – this is a beautifully told tale. Today, as New York reluctantly relinquishes its status as Planet Earth’s number one city (to be replaced by Mumbai, Beijing?), its citizens and admirers can flick through the 560 pages of this oversized tome and reflect on a metropolis that changed us all forever. Very much our kinda town.
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