CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/27/2017

New York in Photobooks

Ken Schles's Invisible City (1988), Weegee's Naked City (1945), William Klein's Life is Good & Good For You in New York (1956) and Anthony Aviles and Don Charles's Harlem Stirs (1966) are four of almost 50 quintessential volumes featured in New York in Photobooks. A must-have for any collector of photography books, this 240-page paperback is a treasure. Other photographers include Berenice Abbott, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, Daido Moriyama, Bruce Davidson and Robert Rauschenberg, to name just a few. "Every photobook is a forest proud of its individual trees," editor Horacio Fernandez writes, "a group of images that are neither autonomous nor obliged to be confined within a frame in order to gain a sense of their own identity or essence. On the contrary, in these books, photos are the subordinated clauses of a text with a beginning and an end: a mosaic that only acquires meaning when all the parts combine to make a coherent and legible work."