Submitted by Jean Dykstra on Sun, 01/22/2012 - 2:23pm
Roeblings Folly, Courtesy Robert Anderson Gallery
Barbara Mensch’s photographs of New York are like images from another era, rediscovered documents from the time of Stieglitz and Strand. The romantic pictures, on view at the Robert Anderson Gallery through March 3, are love notes to New York, and particularly to that much-photographed structure, the Brooklyn Bridge. Mensch’s Water Street loft, where she has lived for more than 30 years, looks out onto the bridge, and it is the sole subject of 12 of the prints on view. The geometric lines of its cables and the vaulting arc of its towers are captured in lovingly sepia-toned gelatin silver prints.
A second room is devoted to photographs from her series “New York on Foot,” images of industrial structures, back alleys, and down at the heel neighborhoods. The last days of The Thunderbolt, for example, a deteriorating roller coaster on Coney Island that was torn down in 2000, is memorialized by Mensch in a wistful selenium-toned print.
Mensch has done long-term projects devoted to other New York City landmarks, including the Fulton Fish Market, which was the subject of two books, The Last Waterfront (1985) and South Street (2007). There is a poignancy to her work, which has to do not only with the transformation of New York City, but with the transformation of photography itself. Her pictures are reminders of the richness and depth of traditional black and white film, printed by the photographer who shot it.
By Jean Dykstra
