New York Waterfront Diary gathers nearly two hundred photographs that Sophie Fenwick has made along the city’s edge over several decades. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2023, the book moves between Coney Island, Red Hook in Brooklyn, and other waterfront sites, recording places marked by abandonment and decay as well as by continued use and vitality. Fenwick works across gelatin silver prints, color slides, stills from Super 8 films, and digital snapshots, so the sequence shifts register without settling into a single pictorial mode.
Personal writing runs alongside some of the images: poetry Fenwick wrote in the early days of the pandemic. The volume also includes a conversation between the photographer and Pauline Vermare, a curator, historian, and writer whose credits include work at Magnum Photos, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA. Lev Zeitlin of Red Square Design has given the book a scrapbook-like structure, one that allows disparate formats and moments to sit together as a diary rather than a survey. The result is a meditation on time and distance, as much as a portrait of a changing shoreline.
Fenwick, a French-American photographer born in New York in 1969, studied at Parsons in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York. She began documenting the waterfront while working for Magnum in the early 1990s; her first solo exhibition, Entrepôts d’Eaux (Homage to the Port of New York), pursued the same subject in Paris. Her photographs have since been shown at the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Public Library, and other venues. This is her first book.
For collectors, the appeal lies in the book’s internal logic: a long archive edited into a bilingual English-and-French hardcover, 192 pages, 21.6 × 24 cm. The combination of Fenwick’s sustained attention, the mix of photographic media, and Vermare’s interview gives the project a historical and conversational frame. It belongs with serious photobooks about New York, memory, and the uses of an archive.
