Jan Staller has photographed New York’s neglected edges for decades — rusting infrastructure, vacant lots, the things a city leaves behind. Manhattan Project turns his attention upward and west, gathering pictures made over the past ten years as Manhattan’s West Side has been rebuilt: high-rise frames, hoardings, stacked building materials, the raw stock of a neighbourhood perpetually under construction.

He works close. Instead of describing buildings whole, Staller isolates and magnifies surfaces — building surfaces and the relationships between materials — until construction detail resolves into line, colour and interval. The photographs often read as drawings or as abstract painting, and that resemblance carries the book’s argument: the ordinary fabric of development has formal qualities most passers-by never see. Light, texture and geometry do the work here, not reportage.

5 Continents Editions publishes the book in hardback, 120 pages, 28 × 24 cm, with text in English and French. A preface by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and an essay by Brett Littman, former director of the Isamu Noguchi Museum and now senior director at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, accompany the plates. Their texts accompany Staller’s photographs, bringing scientific and curatorial perspectives to the project.

The book also places Staller’s recent photographs within a substantial body of work. Four decades of photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the High Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago; work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago; he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Corporation. Two earlier monographs, Frontier New York and On Planet Earth, established him as a photographer of the American landscape’s aftermath. Manhattan Project is not a restatement of that terrain but a continuation into the building site itself, and the bilingual hardback gives the sequences room to register.