On a winter day in 2013, Susan B. Anthony drove north from her home in Columbia County and encountered Troy, New York, for the first time. She returned the following weekend with her Hasselblad—and continued returning for ten years. Susan B. Anthony: Collar City: A Photographic Portrait of Troy, New York grows from that sustained attention rather than from a brief survey or a single historical proposition.

Troy’s identity is inseparable from industry. A nineteenth-century center of steel manufacturing and brickmaking, it acquired the name “Collar City” after the invention and local production of detachable shirt collars. Industrial decline in the later twentieth century left a layered city: factories still operating beside abandoned plants, graffiti-covered structures near imposing houses built by factory owners. More recent residents have restored homes whose Troy brick, marble fireplaces, and Tiffany windows preserve evidence of an earlier prosperity.

Anthony photographs this environment in states of both deterioration and renewal, while also making portraits of Troy’s residents, from young children to elders with decades of local experience. The conjunction matters. Architecture is not treated as an isolated record of style, nor are the people detached from the economic and material history around them. Together, the photographs describe a diverse, multigenerational community inhabiting the consequences of industrial expansion, contraction, and gradual reconstruction.

Published by MW Editions in 2025, Collar City merits attention for the duration and breadth of its engagement with one American city. For collectors concerned with postindustrial landscapes, regional histories, or the relationship between portraiture and place, the book offers a concentrated case study: not a fixed image of decline or revival, but an account of how both conditions remain visible at once. Its distinction lies in that balance between historical structure, changing domestic life, and individual presence.