Joel Sternfeld’s *Walking the High Line* records a New York landmark before it became a public park: an abandoned freight railway running above Manhattan’s West Side, its tracks overtaken by wildflowers and its elevated route offering an unexpected rural presence within the city. Sternfeld photographed the line over more than a year and across the seasons, giving the book a sustained sense of place rather than the character of a single-day document.

The photographs were made while the Friends of the High Line were working to preserve the structure against demolition and commercial redevelopment. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Sternfeld and publisher Gerhard Steidl moved swiftly to turn the project into a book; the original volume appeared soon afterward, helping New Yorkers see the abandoned railway as a landscape worthy of protection. The book’s significance therefore lies not only in its subject, but in the way photography entered a civic argument: images made a hidden site legible, imaginable, and publicly valued.

This revised edition, published by Steidl in 2020, adds nine photographs, enlarges the format, and includes an updated timeline. Those changes preserve the work’s documentary and advocacy-driven origins while giving the sequence a fuller account of the High Line’s early condition and contested future. The photographs balance urban observation with seasonal attention—vegetation, birds, tracks, and distant buildings share the same frame—so that infrastructure appears at once abandoned, inhabited, and potentially communal.

For collectors, the book deserves attention as a concise example of how a photobook can participate in the making of a place’s cultural meaning. Its 80-page sequence joins Sternfeld’s measured color photography to a specific historical moment and to a consequential collaboration with Steidl. It is an English-language hardcover monograph whose revised form makes clear that the book itself is part of the High Line’s history, not merely a record of it.