No. 123
Everyone already has a mind’s-eye postcard view of the New York skyline. That’s the problem: We have, collectively, loved our city’s spiky profile to death. To create the images below, photographer Susan Wides took her camera and tripod to familiar sites, looking to shoot them in unfamiliar ways. Her large-format view camera and depth-of-field manipulations give these photographs a retro quality, evoking the mid-century masters who first documented skyscraper culture in black-and-white. Her photographs are fluid rather than static: Her lens swings, tilts, and pans, giving the images a dynamism that they share with the city they capture, itself an ongoing act of imagination.

View from the top of the Empire State Building. (Photos by Susan Wides.)

View from 30 Rockefeller Plaza's new Top of the Rock Observation Deck.

View from Liberty Island.

View from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

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Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Christopher Bonanos
• Table of Contents: Dec 26, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!