Joel Sternfeld: Walking the High Line

Rating:
Summary: Slightly off the beaten tracks
Review: Joel Sternfeld had the right idea when he took photos of Manhattan's High Line in 2000. These are great images of the abandoned railroad and they work so well because you don't really realise that the track is way above street level and now overgrown with all manner of greenery. These photos perhaps give an eerie impression of what Manhattan might look like some months after all the people left.

Apart from the excellent twenty-four photos I found this book very disappointing, there is the usual annoyance of having all the captions on one page at the back of the book. Plenty of room is available to center them under each photo. There are two essays, one by John Stilgoe I found very tedious, Adam Gopnick's was more interesting as it directly concerned the High Line, its history and possible future. Both essays take up twenty-two pages, almost as much as the photo section and this after all is a photo book.

BTW you can see all of the photos on the High Line web site, had I known that I would not have bought the book!