Immaginare New York gathers more than one hundred photographs from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection to consider how New York has been made visible—and imaginable—through photography. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2009, the Italian-language hardcover presents the city not as a single stable subject but as a changing field of movement, ambition, architecture, and human encounter. Its 152 pages bring together multiple generations of image-making, tracing a sustained photographic engagement with the metropolis.
The book’s point of departure is a question posed by Berenice Abbott in 1939: how might the characteristic flow of metropolitan New York, and the interplay between its inhabitants and solid architecture, be rendered in black and white and on a two-dimensional surface? The selection answers through varied ways of seeing rather than through one authorial style. Photographs by Abbott, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee, and others—including anonymous contributions in keeping with the Museum’s tradition—allow the city’s collective image to emerge as layered and contested.
Literary quotations drawn from major works of American literature accompany the photographs, adding a verbal register to the book’s visual construction of place. The result is neither a monographic statement nor a straightforward city survey, but a collection shaped by the dialogue between an institutional archive, multiple photographic sensibilities, and the cultural imagination of New York. Sarah Hermanson Meister, curator in MoMA’s Department of Photography, is credited in the publisher’s account as the curator of the project.
For collectors, the book merits attention as a compact record of how a major museum collection frames one of photography’s defining urban subjects. Its value lies in the breadth of the selection and in the productive tension between celebrated names, anonymous images, documentary observation, formal experimentation, and literary association. The 22 × 25 cm hardcover, with 139 duotone illustrations, offers a considered object through which New York can be read as both lived city and photographic idea.
