New York City [antikvár]

PUBLISHER'S NOTE,1972The noted photographer Victor Laredo, who has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, has been an astute observer of the New York scene for over thirty years. The present album includes 170 examples of his finest work, an arresting personal vision of the island of Manhattan.Beginning at the Battery, Mr. Laredo guides us steadily northward through the financial district and the City Hall area, into Chinatown, the Lower West Side, the Lower East Side, SoHo, Greenwich Village, the East Village, Chelsea, Gramercy Park, Madison Square, the garment district, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Park Avenue, the Upper West Side, Central Park, the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem.Architecture is of primary importance to Mr. Laredo. Not only does he offer us excellent "portraits" of individual buildings. He alsó gives us numerous glimpses of delightful ornaments and details that often elude the casual passerby. Above all, there is a wealth of cityscapes, seen from bold and unusual angles, which capture the kaleidoscopically shifting interrelationships of surfaces and contours that compose the reál face of Manhattan. The phenomenal rate of úrban growth and change is alsó in evidence here: a number of buildings, including once familiar landmarks, that were photographed by Mr. Laredo less than ten years ago are no more than a memory today.But the people of New York are alsó of concern to this photographer. We find them at work: artists and tradesmen, Park Avenue secretaries and members of the city's leading industries, clothing manufacture and printing. We find them at play: in a wide variety of everyday leisure activities, and at public and priváté festivities. The bustling life of streets and parks is lovingly recorded.Thomas Reilly's lively captions, compiled from a wide variety of the most recent and reliable source material as well as from painstaking personal investigations, identify the buildings shown and their architectural styles, give detailed histories of many buildings and sites, and offer much information on ethnic lore, the economics of neighborhoods, business statistics and the life of the city in generál.Casual visitor or lifetime resident, on your next walk through New York you will find Mr. Laredo's artistic vision guiding your own eyes toward the unusual view, the teliing detail, that you may have overlookedan enrichment of your experience of the world's most astonishing city.