Sean Vegezzi’s DMYCC is not a book about a place so much as a book about a claim staked on one. The place is a tunnel segment beneath Lower Manhattan, built in the 1970s by the New York City Transit Authority for the Second Avenue Subway and then left in disuse — a phantom enclosure that Vegezzi encountered and, across roughly a decade, made into something else: a social forum, a stage, a club, a studio. Loose Joints published the resulting volume in 2017, and its sheer extent is part of the argument. Six hundred twenty-four pages, seven hundred twenty-three colour plates, bound as a softback with a faux-leather cover.
The photographs accumulate rather than announce. Vegezzi sequences them as a loose chronology, beginning with early analogue images of youthful exploration and widening to include video stills, receipts, and architectural floor plans; the book closes with full-scale photographic surveys that rival bureaucratic structural reports in detail and formal composure. Running alongside this is an inversion of surveillance: Vegezzi monitors the authorities and other intruders, mapping their movements, vehicles, trash, and notes. His indexical appetite sharpens over time, as though accumulating images could validate an ownership held without title.
Threaded through the sequence is the labour of renovation. We watch a contaminated interior with non-functioning utilities acquire dust control, a working drainage system, primed walls, repaired electrical lines, deliberate lighting. Through such disciplined tasks, Vegezzi and his friends blur the line between municipal overhaul and informal upkeep; the city becomes an unknowing collaborator. Complicating any simple reading, an exhibition Vegezzi planned inside the space was discovered and halted, and the project then took the shape it holds here.
For a collector, the book’s interest lies in its coordination of many registers — youthful analogue pictures, administrative scraps, forensic survey — into a single examined territory. Vegezzi’s practice concerns how public and private space acts on the individual, and DMYCC gives that concern its longest and most structured form.
