Bruce Gilden’s Facing New York belongs to the street tradition at its most confrontational. The subjects are New Yorkers encountered at close range, caught mid-gesture in the city’s daily rush. Gilden has spoken of his fascination with “characters,” and that word governs the book: the figures here are theatrical, self-invented, sometimes tawdry, often guarded. What keeps the work from becoming caricature is its insistence on proximity. These are neighbours as much as spectacles, and the photographs expose the humanity beneath the hard surfaces.

Dewi Lewis Publishing issued this hardcover edition in 2019, presenting 44 duotone plates across 92 pages at a generous 33.7 by 24.5 centimetres. The book first appeared in 1992 from Cornerhouse Publications, where Dewi Lewis was founding director, and it was Gilden’s first major publication. In the years since, it has been recognised as a classic and has long been out of print, which gives the reissue a documentary value beyond the individual pictures: it restores to circulation a body of work that helped define a mode of urban street photography.

This edition is not a simple reprint. Gilden replaced two images, admitting he could not understand why they had been left out of the original selection. The change is small in number but telling in implication, the photographer revisiting a foundational sequence and adjusting its rhythm. The result is a book that reads as both a historical document and a living edit, one artist’s later judgment brought to bear on an earlier self.

For collectors of postwar street photography and of photobooks as designed objects, the reappearance of Facing New York matters. Its scale, its duotone printing and its sequence give the work a physical presence that suits its subject: the crowded, insistent theatre of the street, where, in Gilden’s world, no one stands at the margins of centre stage.