Outer Boroughs

About this book

Continues the tradition -- actually the several traditions -- of photography in New York City. The predecessors of William Meyers worked almost entirely in Manhattan, but he worked in the other four boroughs -- Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Most of his pictures were taken on anonymous streets where the people of the place live and go about their business; they represent the quotidian, not the spectacular; they are the outer boroughs of the spirit as well as of the physical city.The work is not concerned with documentation, the way things look, but with thusness -- the feel of a place at a particular moment. Each image represents a certain time in a certain part of a certain city where, he has found, even in unlikely neighborhoods there are occasions for beauty.