Sometimes people – most of them young, in their twenties and thirties, but occasionally someone edging toward the more geezerly side of life – will leave Austin and move to New York City. They’ve heard the call, felt the attraction resonating through decades of American pop culture and friends’ reminiscences, and eventually they make the move.
And sometimes – not always, but more often than not – after several months or a few years of dealing with life up there in the north, they move back to Austin.
They don’t move back with complaints of how they hated that Big Apple of a metropolis at the heart of the Empire State. They just … it just … well, it wasn’t what they wanted, after all: Too much of everything all the time; not really the most welcoming place to raise kids, to have stretches of consciousness undistracted by a million manifestations of spectacle and industry and steady urban drama; also, it’s just too damned expensive, isn’t it? Unless you’re some high-powered lawyer or investment broker or whatever?
And yet people keep going, and returning, and bringing back their memories.
Carter Berg isn’t one of those people. Carter Berg, photographer of impressive lensing chops – he’s shot for Elle Decor and The Wall Street Journal, for Ralph Lauren fashion campaigns – was born and raised in NYC, and he lives there now. All of that, amplified by the typical high production values of teNeues Publishing Company, is why Berg’s New York Snapshots is exactly the book to bring to visual immediacy whatever version of NYC you may have once lived in or visited or, at this point, still only heard about.
Hardcover, sturdily bound, this posh coffeetable book offers an array of images from that fabled city that never sleeps, from panoramas of the soaring skyline to close-up details of urban modification and decay, from the wintertime frameworks of Coney Island fun machines to the eye-to-eye snap of a Red-Tail Hawk in a tree near Tompkins Square Park. There’s the subway stop for Yankee Stadium; here are stalls of fresh fruit and fish in Chinatown. Look: a pair of street buskers going percussive side by side, one on a full Pearl drumkit, the other on a pair of overturned pickle buckets. And that is a statue of Aphrodite among the timeworn grays and blacks of concrete and steel. And this is the handpainted sign on the garage door of the Fire Department in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. And, on page after page, the New York City that currently exists, though riddled as ever with reminders of its own much-storied past, presents itself according to Berg’s roving and image-hungry trio of cameras: a Canon G10, mostly, supplemented with a Fuji X-E1 and a Holga 120.
Final Note: This book, New York Snapshots, is more about the architecture and the infrastructure of the city, about the material shapes and textures, than it is about the people; it’s definitely more about the things encountered and the places inhabited than it is about the inhabitants themselves. But, as such, it’s one hell of a fine collection of resonant surfaces – at once a subjective view and an objective record of what, for at least the past two centuries, was truly the capital of dreams for an entire world.
This article appears in October 10 • 2014.