ABOUT THIS PROJECT
I’ve spent the past twenty years photographing New York City, guided mostly by curiosity and the impulse to explore the less obvious corners of the map. Along the way, I began accumulating loosely grouped bodies of work, things like dead ends, handball courts, and storefront churches. The urban typologies resurfaced again and again, like connective tissue linking disparate parts of the city.
As the archive grew, I realized it might be interesting (and a good excuse to keep wandering) to approach things more systematically: to visit every neighborhood in New York, filling in the blank spaces of the mental map I’d assembled through years of walking. The goal isn’t completion for its own sake, but to create a record of the city in the early 21st century—what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like right now.
This newsletter follows that effort, exploring a different neighborhood each week. The project draws inspiration from photographers like Eugène Atget, Charles Marville, and Berenice Abbott, whose work exists both as art and as documentary record.
In each neighborhood, I focus on what catches my attention: the surprising, the overlooked, and the absurd alongside (occasionally) the historically significant. Rather than photographing iconic landmarks and well-documented sites, the project aims to capture what photographer Bob Thall calls “those visual occasions that, cumulatively, make a place a place.”
Through a mix of research, field recordings, contemporary and archival photography, and writing, I hope this work adds one more layer to the ongoing visual and written history of New York City.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks
Teju Cole, Open City, 2012
ABOUT ME
I’m Rob Stephenson, a photographer and musician living and working in Brooklyn, NY. My work primarily focuses on exploring the urban condition by examining the landscapes and architecture that define it.
I’ve received fellowships from the OSV Foundation, the Design Trust for Public Space, The Camera Club of New York, and the New York Foundation for Arts. My photographs have been commissioned by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, T Magazine, and Businessweek, and I have published two books, Myths of the Near Future, exploring the post-Shuttle landscape in the Space Coast of Florida and From Roof to Table, documenting the urban agriculture movement in New York City.
You can see more of my work on my website.
I also made a standalone webpage featuring my field recordings here: City of Sound
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