New York in the Forties brings together 162 photographs by Andreas Feininger, accompanied by text from John von Hartz. Published by Dover Publications in 1978, the book looks back at New York during the 1940s through an extensive photographic account of the city’s places, activities, and social life. Its subject is not a single district or event, but the metropolis considered across a defining decade.

The book’s field of observation reaches from the old Metropolitan Opera House to shops on the Lower East Side and the boardwalk at Coney Island. Commerce, industry, and shipping appear alongside neighborhood streets and sites of recreation. This breadth resists an exclusively monumental picture of New York: major institutions are set within the same larger record as retail life, work, movement, and leisure. The result is a city understood through the coexistence of civic scale and ordinary use.

Feininger’s 162 images give the project the depth of a sustained survey rather than a brief portfolio. The volume’s concern with history, social customs, and street photography makes it useful on several levels: as a portrait of New York, as a record of urban life in the 1940s, and as an example of how a photographer can organize a broad civic subject. Von Hartz’s credited text adds a second authorial presence to a book conceived as more than an uncaptioned sequence of pictures.

For collectors of urban and documentary photography, the book deserves attention for its clearly bounded historical subject and unusually wide civic range. Its significance lies in the accumulation of views—cultural landmarks, commercial districts, industrial activity, neighborhood shops, and popular recreation—within one extended publication. Viewed from its 1978 publication date, it also represents a deliberate act of looking back, shaping photographs of the 1940s into a retrospective account of the city.