MAY 1, 2008 The New York Public Library will introduce this week a new exhibit on public space as it relates to photography. The collection of photographs features the works of five artists.
“Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City” documents those artists’ travels around the city. The exhibit, located in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, will be on display throughout the summer.
Stephen Pinson is the curator of the exhibit. He said he thinks a major theme of the included photography is the changing nature of the public and private spaces of the city.
“The concept of eminent domain is used as a lens or a filter to raise questions that hopefully resonate…about the shifting of public and private space,” said Pinson.
Pinson suggested that photography could help to define the borders between public and private space, but New York University photography professor Mark Jenkinson questioned the connection.
“What does any of that have to do with photography?” he said.
But NYU freshman and Washington Square News photography editor Christine Lockerby finds a tie between public space and photography, even if it is not identical to the tie Pinson sees.
“A photograph can relate to a public space in that you take a picture of something and you can share it with other people…maybe it was like a quiet moment or a scene that only you saw and you can show it to other people so they can enjoy it and see its beauty,” said Lockerby.
She explained that she thought public areas were similar to photographs in the way we share them. A picture allows us to share a beautiful moment we experienced; an open, public park allows us all to share beautiful time in that park.
Regardless of whether or not the connection is present, each artist in the exhibit invested months of effort into documenting a part of the city. Sometimes that meant spending nights and days with a young Chinese family living in New York. Other times it found an artist taking a photograph of Manhattan from the same location every day for 11 years.
For contributing photographer and part-time NYU professor Bettina Johae, the exhibit meant spending three years biking around the edges of each of New York’s boroughs, and then photographing and investigating what she saw there.
“[She is] taking on a different view of the cities in which she’s living….[and] making literal the public spaces of the city,” said Pinson.
Johae agreed that she thinks her photographs show a side of the city many New Yorkers rarely see. How often do Brooklyn residents find themselves biking along the edge of Staten Island? That’s precisely what Johae did, however.
In conjunction with her exhibit, Johae is offering bicycle tours along some of the paths that she photographed. By doing so, she said she hopes to bring people to a place where the city is very different from what those people expected.
Johae encouraged students who long for fresh air and green grass to explore places she discovered in her biking—like the large park spaces in the Bronx.
“People should get out of their dorm rooms, get out of Washington Square Park,” said Johae.
Pinson also discussed Washington Square Park, though for a different reason. For Pinson, many of the photographs in the exhibit speak about the privatization of public space. One of his examples of a public space being privatized was the park.
CAS freshman Steph Wells said that she doesn’t think the park has been privatized by any group or organization.
“I don’t think NYU is really taking over Washington Square Park, even though we technically surround it,” said Wells. “It’s still a public park. It’s still a public space.”
CAS senior Roger Almeida said he would support an NYU privatization of the park, even if it meant closing the park off to the general public, because it could result in a better campus for NYU.
Tisch freshman Greg Karlin agreed with Pinson that the park has become privatized in a sense, but not due to NYU’s presence.
“I think it’s the million dollar brownstones in front of the park. Greenwich Village destroyed itself, it got too popular and richer people moved in,” said Karlin. To Karlin, all of that private ownership surrounding the park means a more privately owned ‘feel’ of the park.
Perhaps the artists’ photographs themselves can offer their own commentary about this conflict. Interested readers can visit the exhibit for free beginning Friday, May 2 until it closes August 29.
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