New York: Portrait of a City by Reuel Golden
New York: Portrait of a City
By Reuel Golden
(Taschen)
With Reuel Golden’s New York, Taschen knocks it out of the park yet again. If you are from New York, live in the suburbs or boroughs around the city or just like history, this tome of a hardcover is for you. With amazing photographs from the likes of Larry Fink, Weegee and Marvin and Arnold Newman, we are treated to exquisite pictures from all over the city, from the late 1800s to 2006. With quick prose to open each chapter (in English, German and French) we get the profane, the startling, the poignant and pristine, from parks, to camera club rooms, to street scenes and sport events.
Like a lot of Taschen titles, there is more than a little titillation here, not so much from nude bodies but from phallic skyscrapers that thrust open with light and the pumping animus one feels when looking at these mostly black and white pictures. Sure, we might have seen some of these before, but laid out as they are in New York, it’s as if we are looking at the pics anew.
If I have any criticism, I found some of the captions a little cheesy, not in keeping with the well reasoned text and spectacular pictures, but it is a minor point in a major book and one you simply must own.
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