Every Neighborhood in New York City?

A Sense of Place

In my 20+ years of working as a photographer in New York City, I've spent a good chunk of time traversing various neighborhoods in search of locations that go against conventional expectations of what the city looks and feels like. My personal projects and editorial assignments have led me to the furthest reaches of the boroughs where the city gives way to sea, swampland, or simply peters out into a diluted, suburban version of itself. In the process, I've accumulated a significant archive of photos that don't fit neatly into any project, so I started thinking about organizing the work geographically.

a beautiful visualization of the fuzzy perception of neighborhood boundaries when defined by its residents

There are somewhere between 240 and 306 neighborhoods in New York City, depending on who you ask. Since my work has always been concerned with the idea of a Sense of Place, I thought looking at the city through the reductive prism of its many neighborhoods could be an interesting exercise. Can the multitude of neighborhoods of NYC contain within their fluctuating borders their own discernible Sense of Place? This newsletter will chronicle my attempt to make a photographic sketch of all of them using a mix of new work and preexisting images. I’ll try to dig up some interesting information about each neighborhood, maybe I’ll include an audio component or some collaborations with other artists. Who knows? Certainly not me.

I’ve already made two projects dealing with specific places in New York City - There Swept out of the Sea a Song looking at the Rockaway peninsula in Queens as well as more recent work on Staten Island.

Far Rockaway, Queens

Midland Beach, Staten Island

While both these long-term projects are deeper investigations than I will be able to achieve in a broader survey, they are indicative of the kind of work I hope to be making and the themes and subjects that interest me.

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Sufjan Stevens once claimed he was going to make a different record for every state. That later turned out to be a brazen promotional gimmick that never made it past the 2nd state. While this may also be a brazen promotional gimmick (that would take me almost six years of weekly newsletters to finish), I’m confident I can do better than Sufjan’s 4%.

These two guys (coming up with the plan to do so independently) managed to walk every block in NYC- over 6000 miles. Photographing every neighborhood should be a piece of cake in comparison.

Thanks for reading this far, and if you want to follow along, please subscribe below.

Rob

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