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Photo projects like “Humans of New York” tell some amazing stories that are often forgotten in the chaos of the city. While “Humans” is truly monumental, many other projects exist that fall into the category of “epic New York City art projects that can’t help but touch our jaded little hearts,” as coined by New York Magazine‘s Joe Coscarelli. Giving new meaning to the aphorism, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” here are four other photography endeavors that aim to uncover wondrous parts of NYC’s “Untapped” history.
If you live in Manhattan, you’re bound to walk by at least one bodega each day. According to photographer Gail Quagliata, there should be approximately 4,000 of these convenience stores, and she has set out to photograph them all. Quagliata claims that each bodega is a “microcosm of New York,” as each store sells many of the same items while still maintaining a distinct personality that caters specifically to its extremely localized clientele. As of August, 2013, Quagliata has scoured pretty much every street in Manhattan, with only the two Harlem neighborhoods to go. Read more about her motivations, the difficult task of differentiating between bodegas and grocers, and her dread of the imminent spread of 7-11’s on Vanishing New York.
Joanne Dugan started photographing unique New York City typography in order to make reading fun for her son. After publishing a book of these images and discovering the letters’ universal appeal, she founded a company, The Alphabet City, to produce various home products that display these vintage letters. Recently, the MoMA Design Store selected the company’s coasters to be included in its Destination: NYC collection. Dugan sees her project as a preservation effort, considering each of these letters to be a “little piece of history.”
Two New York photographers share a passion for neon lights. Kirsten Hively started Project Neon in 2010 by taking pictures of neon signs in the Upper East Side, near her new workplace. She put the photos up on Flickr, and after confirming their popularity, a successful Kickstarter led her to start an iPhone app allowing easy access to her photos. She is even selling prints of her photos on an Etsy store. Hively is taking a brief break from the project to deal with some personal health issues, but she anticipates to be back by Fall.
Thomas Rinaldi’s book, New York Neon, also contains plenty of photos of New York neon signage. However, this tome, published in late 2012, focuses more on documenting the history of neon signs in the city. Unlike Hively’s project, New York Neon is not ongoing, but Rinaldi did spend a lengthy five years searching for, photographing, and researching neon signs. His book even details how neon signs are made.
Untapped Cities reader Ellen Levitt has written three books on the city’s “lost synagogues.” One focuses on Queens, another on Brooklyn, and the last on Manhattan. Each book features photos of over eighty buildings that were once synagogues. Levitt also researched each of these buildings and tells their histories, comparing what they once were to how they are now. In addition, Levitt maintains a Facebook page that she continually updates with photos of lost synagogues, each with a short caption summarizing its story.
In other quirky projects, there’s the ongoing quest to break the Guiness World Records for riding through every subway station.
Matt Green, who once walked across the entire country, has decided to keep up his walking project by walking on every street in New York City. To his (and our) knowledge, he is the first person who has attempted this challenge of walking somewhere between 6000 and 8000 miles by early 2015, which is when he expects to be finished. Like many of the other big thinkers in this roundup, Green acknowledges that there is so much that has yet to be discovered in New York. He doesn’t expect to find them all, but he admits that “it is profoundly encouraging to think of how many secrets will still lie undiscovered after I’ve walked every last one of these goddamned streets.” Although this project is not exactly centered around photography, Green updates his blogs with photos of his quirky finds.
For the last three years, five friends have been visiting and documenting New York’s old-school pizza joints. For extra authenticity, all five are native New Yorkers. According to Ian Manheimer, a member of The New York Pizza Project, they’ve “been to over 100 of the most authentic shops in the City: talking to patrons and pizza makers, snapping photos…We like to say, it’s not about the food, it’s about everything else.”
The New York Pizza Project is now available as a coffee table book and to celebrate the launch, we asked Manheimer to share with us the 10 pizza joints in New York City with the biggest personality. You can check out that list here.
As we recently covered, Roy Colmer photographed 3,200 Manhattan doors in 1976 in his conceptual art piece Doors, NYC. To execute the project, from November 1975 to September 1976, he took pictures of doors that he often saw everyday in sequence. This meant that he left out doors from entire neighborhoods, which is why the photographs on the map are somewhat clustered. According to Vanishing NY, Colmer did not care about “the particular street, historic or architectural importance of the door.” Instead, he just took pictures of whatever doors he immediately saw as he walked.
Get in touch with the author @YiinYangYale.
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