City of tomorrow?

摘要

This is a book of photographs about a city, but not quite like any other that I know. The city in question is New York but its monuments or landmarks are hardly in sight; the thousand or more images that make up the book are almost all details. The disparate urban phenomena they record are grouped into 32 separate sections: for instance, pavement displays of street vendors' merchandise; facades of defunct shops and businesses (commercial casualties); the coloured codes and instructions on roads awaiting excavation or repair. The authors try to locate each of these sections in an overall taxonomy, which has three main headings: System, Order, Identity. The branching diagram of this is the book's only text, and without any other explanation the structure seems tenuous. But the photographs — especially when seen in series-are compelling.