#55 CAMERA Book Review: Joel Sternfeld - Walking The High Line

An intriguing flick through Walking the High Line by photographer Joel Sternfeld.

You learn something every day and this really opened my eyes to another part of New York.

Joel Sternfeld's Walking the High Line was first published by Steidl in 2001 and documents Manhattan's abandoned elevated freight railway before its transformation into the High Line public park. Beginning in March 2000, Sternfeld photographed the disused railway through every season, recording the unexpected landscape of grasses, wildflowers and self seeded vegetation that had reclaimed the tracks above the streets of New York's West Side. Produced at a time when the future of the structure was uncertain, the book became closely associated with the campaign led by Friends of the High Line to prevent its demolition and preserve it as a public space. Essays by Adam Gopnik and John Stilgoe accompany the photographs, placing the work within the historical and cultural context of the city.

Rather than treating the High Line simply as an abandoned industrial structure, Sternfeld photographed it as a living landscape suspended within the urban environment. His large format colour photographs explore the relationship between nature, architecture and the changing city, revealing how neglected spaces can acquire new ecological and social significance over time. Made before the High Line was redeveloped and opened as a public park in 2009, Walking the High Line remains an important documentary record of a vanished landscape and demonstrates how photography contributed to preserving one of New York City's most significant examples of adaptive urban reuse.

Steidl Verlag 72 pages / 26 x 21.5 cm Clothbound 12/2001

Joel Sternfeld
Steidl

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