Photographer Barbara Mensch's rediscovered photo archives and interview tapes capture symbolic transformations of Lower Manhattan.
Many of the images are published here for the first time. The photographs evoke the passage of time by dividing the images into three parts: the 1980s, 1990s, and the new millennium (2000 and beyond). The photographer shares with the viewer:
"I would shoot ruins of buildings, the demolition of famous waterfront saloons, ancient alleyways, and in some cases, 19th-century buildings destroyed by mysterious fires. There were images of floods and other calamities/ catastrophes in lower Manhattan, culminating with 9/11.
These photos captured what had been, what no longer exists. They served as my visual timeline. What did the passage of the many decades reveal to me? What dynamics were in my images of the same streets I repeatedly walked for years?"
Her images from the Fulton Fish Market in the 1980s document the generations of immigrants and their children pursuing a gritty American Dream next to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Photos from the 1990s present images of floods and fires that paralyzed the area juxtaposed with continued bulldozing to clear the way for luxury housing. Politics reshaped Manhattan's skyline by encouraging new commercial shopping, food, and restaurant destinations. This restructuring marked the beginning of the end of Downtown's blue-collar origins and white-collar replacement, challenging us to ask, "What was lost?"
In the 2000s, the seminal event: September 11th, reinforced Downtown's rebirth as the global economic engine with no room for the past. Also included in this section is an interview with an insider privy to the mafia leadership of the Fulton Fish Market during Giuliani's opportunistic crusade against them in the 1980s.
Dan Barry, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, offers a poetic and insightful tribute to the artist and photographer.
*Definitions: falling off suggests a decline in quality or quantity, falling off suggests the passage of time or changes over time, falling off suggests a detachment, an alternative path to a questionable destination, falling off suggests a separation, falling off suggests something that comes to pass.
Photographer Barbara Mensch's rediscovered photo archives and interview tapes capture symbolic transformations of Lower Manhattan.
Many of the images are published here for the first time. The photographs evoke the passage of time by dividing the images into three parts: the 1980s, 1990s, and the new millennium (2000 and beyond). The photographer shares with the viewer:
"I would shoot ruins of buildings, the demolition of famous waterfront saloons, ancient alleyways, and in some cases, 19th-century buildings destroyed by mysterious fires. There were images of floods and other calamities/ catastrophes in lower Manhattan, culminating with 9/11.
These photos captured what had been, what no longer exists. They served as my visual timeline. What did the passage of the many decades reveal to me? What dynamics were in my images of the same streets I repeatedly walked for years?"
Her images from the Fulton Fish Market in the 1980s document the generations of immigrants and their children pursuing a gritty American Dream next to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Photos from the 1990s present images of floods and fires that paralyzed the area juxtaposed with continued bulldozing to clear the way for luxury housing. Politics reshaped Manhattan's skyline by encouraging new commercial shopping, food, and restaurant destinations. This restructuring marked the beginning of the end of Downtown's blue-collar origins and white-collar replacement, challenging us to ask, "What was lost?"
In the 2000s, the seminal event: September 11th, reinforced Downtown's rebirth as the global economic engine with no room for the past. Also included in this section is an interview with an insider privy to the mafia leadership of the Fulton Fish Market during Giuliani's opportunistic crusade against them in the 1980s.
Dan Barry, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, offers a poetic and insightful tribute to the artist and photographer.
*Definitions: falling off suggests a decline in quality or quantity, falling off suggests the passage of time or changes over time, falling off suggests a detachment, an alternative path to a questionable destination, falling off suggests a separation, falling off suggests something that comes to pass.
Barbara G. Mensch has had numerous exhibitions of her photographic work. Her images are represented in some of New York City’s most prestigious galleries, and her work is included in important collections, including those of MoMA, the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Fundacion Televisa of Mexico City, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is the author of South Street and In the Shadow of Genius: The Brooklyn Bridge and Its Creators.
Alison Stewart: When you describe it as a 'falling-off place, '
what does that mean?
Barbara Mensch: 'This is the miracle and mystery of the creative
process. I started thinking about certain playwrights like Thornton
Wilder, I thought about Our Town. I thought about community and
sense of place. This idea of falling off is also a metaphor for
something that's uncertain, or time passing. I said, 'That's the
title.'---Alison Stewart, All of It, WNYC
Barbara Mensch joins MetroFocus to share many of her stunning black
and white photographs in her new book A Falling-Off Place: The
Transformation of Lower Manhattan.---PBS, Metro Focus
Mensch returns us to the grimy, long-vanished world of ice haulers,
unloaders and fish mongers--the denizens of her remarkable 2007
volume, South Street, but with the added, wider view of a
disappearing Downtown that would follow. While not the sort of
extensive, visual rumination on loss that photographer Danny Lyon
brought to The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, Mensch offers a sort
of visual postscript to her valuable documentation. Many of the
images are of a Downtown coming down, in advance of its residential
renewal.-- "The Tribeca Trib"
An epic narrative . . .[A Falling-Off Place] takes an affectionate
but unflinching look at Lower Manhattan through
three eras: the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.-- "The Broadsheet"
From time to time, we like to look back on how New York has changed
over the years, and there's a new book of photographs that does
just that. A Falling-Off Place documents the transformation of
Lower Manhattan from a working man's neighborhood to downtown's
rebirth after 9/11.-- "CBS News"
There is Barbara Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain.
She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the
now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city's
inexorable evolution.---Dan Barry, The New York Times
In this striking collection, photographer Mensch traces three
decades of change on Lower Manhattan's eastern waterfront, paying
particular attention to the Fulton Street Fish Market. The
beautiful images, often rich in chiaroscuro rendered by
streetlights illuminating rainy nights or misty mornings, are
complemented by quotes from residents and workers who provide
insight into life in Lower Manhattan prior to gentrification.
Visually evocative and spare on text . . . It's ideal for anyone
nostalgic for old New York.-- "Publishers Weekly"
Barbara Mensch's A Falling-Off Place features a variety of
extraordinary photographs, ranging from images of demolition, to
men at work, to abstract interiors, and to individual portraits.
Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, her work documents the material
reality of New York in an unprecedented way. And it offers a vision
of the relentless physical transformation of the city and its
impact on working people and their labor.---Daniel Czitrom, author
of New York Exposed
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