Description: A decade-long photographic exploration of Manhattan's West Side. Jan Staller captures the city's architectural rebirth, elevating ordinary building materials into extraordinary compositions. A celebration of urban beauty, light, form, and texture. Text in English and French.
Manhattan Project is a collection of photographs that capture the evolving landscape of Manhattan's West Side over the past decade. Exploiting the revelatory power of photography, these images explore a city's architectural transformation. While Jan Staller's earlier work focused on industrial decay, these new photographs explore the rise of high-rise construction. By isolating and zooming in on building materials, Staller elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. The resulting images, reminiscent of drawings or abstract paintings, reveal the hidden beauty and formal qualities of these often-overlooked elements. This project reimagines the city not as a monolithic entity, but as a composition of intricate details. It celebrates the interplay of light, form and texture, inviting viewers to rethink the familiar and discover the artistic potential of the urban environment. Text in English and French.Brief description: Jan Staller's photographs span a period of over 40 years and have been exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the High Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other public and private institutions. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Corporation. He has published two monographs: Frontier New York (Hudson Hills Press) and On Planet Earth (Aperture). Staller has also worked on assignment for many magazines, including Time and Life Magazine, Fortune, Forbes Magazine, Wired, Discover, Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times and others.
Review Quotes: "By turning his camera on the construction process and abstracting the results through canny framing, Staller has turned New York into an open-air art gallery, alive with ephemeral sculptural objects en route to decades or centuries of entombment within contemporary architecture."--Jonathan Bell "Wallpaper "