Sylvia Plachy

Sylvia Plachy was the first photographer ever to be assigned to shoot the opening picture of the essential Goings On About Town section of The New Yorker. She did so for more than a year, in conjunction with the legendary magazine's front section redesign of 2005. From the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island to Forest Park in Queens, from backstage to center stage, in Goings On About Town, Plachy explores the city's dynamics from the inside out, revealing the vital, and, at times, wacky creativity that energizes New York City around the clock. In so doing, she presents hidden gems that most of us never have a chance to see up close--like Macy's New Jersey workshop for the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade. Plachy's humor and way of looking is particularly suited to such offbeat assignments. Almost entirely in color, this volume also includes some images that have never been published before. Joyful and idiosyncratic, Goings On About Town is quintessentially Plachy, and quintessentially New York.

In this, Plachy's most complex and personal book to date, we are asked to reconsider ideas of self-portraiture and going home again. In 1956, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution, Plachy and her parents escaped into Austria carrying only a small valise. She returned to Hungary eight years later, this time with a camera in hand. Through the gently subversive images gathered here, her life is revealed via clues, fragments of words and pictures as if by someone looking into a mirror and seeing her life pass before her eyes--not linearly like a film, but rather in layers.