PhotoBooks New York

In this remarkable book, Rudnick parses the history, shape, and majesty of some of the city's most cherished landmarks.

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The Finger Lakes region of central New York is a place where light and water meet to create a distinctive look to the land that residents cherish and visitors return to again and again. To capture the wide, open beauty of the long lakes under changing skies and the surrounding hilly vistas, photographer Kristian Reynolds has found the perfect vehicle in a panoramic camera. Within the wide sweep of his lens, he presents images of dramatic gorges, picturesque villages, vivid weather patterns, fertile vineyards, classic boating scenes, and verdant countryside. This is a book for which lifetime lovers and newly initiated fans of the Finger Lakes have long waited, a book which reveals the best of the upstate landscape.

The book's foreword is written by the Hon. Matthew F. McHugh, Counsel to the World Bank and former Upstate New York Member of Congress.

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There are many surprises among the 53 black-and-white photographs in Stanley Greenberg's hymn to the hum of the city that never sleeps. There is a revealing shot of the roof structure above the curved vault of Grand Central Station's night-sky ceiling that shows where those light bulbs are screwed in to form the delicate constellations commuters see every day. The anchorages of several city bridges--the chambers where the powerful cables that hold up the roadways are fastened down--are exposed to view, peeling paint, trash, and all. There is a gleaming shot of a working Con Edison turbine and a cluttered view of a derelict power station at Floyd Bennett Field, the city's first municipally owned commercial airport.

The pictures possess a certain sameness after the first 20 or so, but New York has been immortalized by many of history's very best photographers, so Greenberg has a tough act to follow. He has good company as he searches for a new angle, however, including Laura Rosen, whose Manhattan Shores is an equally quirky but richly satisfying and illuminating trek around the edges of the island, and Horst Hamann, whose New York Vertical has become an instant classic. Anyone who likes the idea of exploring the city's underpinnings instead of the subways, piers, or buildings themselves will love Invisible New York, which also contains an index in which Greenberg imparts fascinating information about each site. --Peggy Moorman

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With concrete and steel covering every inch of Manhattan and the other boroughs, New York is the city of the 20th century. This installment of the Then and Now series documents the evolution and transformation of the archetypal metropolis. Seventy modern color photographs are compared side-by-side with seventy archival photographs from the 1850s to the 1950s. While focusing on famous vistas and familiar landmarks, it also explores well-known neighborhoods. The Then and Now series includes: New York, Washington, Boston, and San Francisco.

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Patrice O'Shaughnessy was born and reared in the city, and has been a Daily News reporter for 20 years, covering its courthouses, precincts, and neighborhoods in human interest stories. She has written extensively on firefighters, chronicling their daring and compassion in the News' "Hero of the Month" feature for the last decade. A special assignment writer, she is the 1998 recipient of the Miker Berger Award. She also received the New York Press Club's Heart of New York Award in 1999 and 2000.

Shawn O'Sullivan is the picture editor for the features department of The New York Daily News.

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Take an unparalleled photographic journey through the Hamptons. The best-known residents of this exclusive cluster of towns open their personal albums and invite you to see the Hamptons - their way. Calvin Klein, Julian Schnabel, Patrick Demarchelier and Peter Beard are just a few of the people who share their visions of one of the most unusual getaway spots in the country. More than a playground for the rich and famous, the Hamptons has an incredibly diverse community. Fisherman and year-round locals have coexisted for more than a century with artists, writers and actors, making this small piece of Long Island so alluring. Combining photo archives and beautiful shots from famous vacationers, In The Spirit Of The Hamptons captures the past and present, the mix of culture, stunning beaches, exclusive homes, day-to-day small-town life and the people who have made the Hamptons such a unique place.

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Some people may mistakenly overlook this book because of the novelty of its central idea--upending a panoramic camera to shoot New York City vertically. But veteran photographer Horst Hamann's pictures have nothing gimmicky about them; in fact, like Berenice Abbott's, they seem destined for New York City photo immortality. The pictures are beautifully controlled--in vision, in camera technique, and in printing. What's more, Hamann bends the city to his vision of light, air, and geometry. A shot of the Statue of Liberty's right arm, holding the lamp aloft, is a masterwork of composition and care. It's as if Hamann somehow arranged for the sea below to darken in precisely the same gradations as the Lady's stately arm. Compare it to a dizzying picture of one of the Chrysler Building's shiny eagle heads, or a serene moment among the hosta lilies in Trinity Church cemetery for a grasp of Hamann's range.

Each photograph is paired with a quotation on the opposite page, such as Walt Whitman's "The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters!" or former mayor James J. Walker's quip, "I'd rather be a lamppost in New York than Mayor of Chicago." The back of the book contains information on the places in the photographs. On a shelf of New York books, this one might take its place next to Paul Goldberger's classic, The City Observed, as a fresh example of how New York's stone, steel, and glass architectural icons are reinvented with each new visionary. --Peggy Moorman

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There is, as Bernie Bookbinder amiably reports, much more to this storied dart of land piercing the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York than ducks, potatoes, the Great Gatsby estates, and the swells who swell the Hampton resort communities in season. They're all here, of course, but so is the island's startling (and beautifully photographed) geology and topography, its Indian past, its early colonization by the Dutch and the English, its occupation during the American Revolution, its vibrant seafaring tradition, its famed--and at times, infamous--railroad, its parkways and expressways, its golf courses and beaches, its laboratories and factories, its suburban sprawl, and its cultural contributions from Walt Whitman to Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Joel. Lavishly illustrated with current and archival photos, drawings and paintings, this eminently readable and appealing volume serves as both a history and tribute to a physicality wracked by identity crisis; while Long Island may make up half of New York City, in many senses, it couldn't be farther removed. It's that continuing dichotomy that makes the place so interesting.

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In The Adirondacks: Wild Island of Hope, Gary A. Randorf offers 100 photographs to illustrate this unique, comprehensive history and natural history of the Adirondack Park, the first private-public partnership in the United States dedicated to the protection of a wilderness area. Situated in northeast New York, this regional park of six million acres represents a unique blend of public wildlands intermixed with commercial forests, farms, mines, private parks, prisons, scattered homes, dozens of villages, and a year-round population of 130,000. The ongoing attempts over the last century to make the Adirondacks a park have made this region a "striving ground" for living with the land, rather than outside or above it. Much of the strife is over finding a right relationship to the land, treating it not as a commodity to be exploited but as a community to which all living things belong and upon which all depend.

Today, the Adirondacks regional park with its six million acres "represents a second-chance wilderness"—as Bill McKibben writes in his foreword to this book. The concerns of this park are the same concerns that apply to all of America's parks, recreational areas, and wildernesses with the addition of how to maintain the fragile peace between human and natural communities. How that "second-chance" can be realized is the focus of Gary Randorf's text and stunning color photographs.

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From Broadway to Madison Avenue and the Hudson River to the Brooklyn Bridge, New York City is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world. With this book you can take a photographic tour of the city and its landmarks, such as the World Trade Center, Times Square, and Rockefeller Center. Includes more than 100 full-color photos with informative captions and anecdotal quotations from some of the city's most famous residents.

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