New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York

When we think 'city', we think New York. From downtown to uptown, no other urban space can claim such a famous skyline or such intensely varied street-life. It is a city that dazzles with its constant visual stimulation. Lavishly illustrated, New York Sights considers the formative period when a nostalgically evoked 'Old New York' transformed into 'New New York', ultimately becoming the modernist city of the twentieth century. Drawing on photography, film, and painting, the author considers the changing skyline, the grid-plan, the growth of the elevated railroad, the homes of the leisure classes, and city streets. Among the artists discussed are: Alfred Stieglitz, Jacob Riis, Georgia O'Keefe, John Sloan, Childe Hassam, and George Bellows. The conclusion looks at the post World War II-period and the shocking visual prospect of a New York skyline without the Twin Towers.

Table of Contents:
1.Visuality and the City: Old and New New York 'The great city...makes its own...optical laws'. 'An acceleration of energies': People, Spaces, Movement and Products 2. 'Unexpected Vistas': Visualising Change Picturesque New York 'Phantasmagorias of the interior': At Home with the Leisure Class 'A Sense for Construction': Building Sites 3.'Accident and then exigency': Elevated Views Representing a System The Return of Content Abstraction and Speed The Passing of the 'Moment' 4.'Scene and Story': The City Up Close Downtown Scenes Getting Around the City Signs in the City 5.'A sense, through the eyes, of embracing possession': Views from a Distance King-size Pictures 'The attempt to take the aesthetic view': New York City as a Work of Art 'Port of New York': The Manhattan Skyline 'The city horizon was the one horizon' 6.New York, New York Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Douglas Tallack is Professor of American Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham. Among his publications are The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story; Twentieth-Century America and City Sites: Multi-Media Essays on New York and Chicago. Professor Tallack has twice won the Arthur Miller Prize for the best American Studies article of the year, and has published many essays on American intellectual and cultural history, and critical theory.

Review :
'An immensely learned and thoughtful exploration of how one city has been perceived and imagined. His book is a truly impressive achievement of scholarship and contemplation.' Professor Stephen J. Whitfield, Department of American Studies, Brandeis University '"New York" as Douglas Tallack astutely notes, is the only proper adjective for New York - a city that requires not a singleness of perspective but the kind of multifarious response offered here. An extraordinarily rich and varied account of the city as a visual text.' Professor Ian F. A. Bell, University of Keele 'Critical theorist Tallack masterfully investigates the urban visuality of Manhattan to determine how the processes of seeing and image making were altered by the social and material transformations that occurred during the city's modernization. An intriguing alternative to traditional art histories.' Ilene Susan Fort, Curator of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art 'My high expectations of New York Sights have been amply met. In particular, the extended analyses of specific photographs, films and paintings-some well-known, but many valuably retrieved from a range of archives-are uncannily precise, interesting in their own right, and actually do make us 'see' something of the forces that transformed the city in "New" New York.' Professor Mick Gidley, University of Leeds 'This is an agenda-setting enterprise, on which is certainly going to challenge preconceptions and established interpretative paradigms.' Eric Homberger, University of Nottingham 'A masterful and original account of New York and the modern visual imagination. Douglas Tallack again proves himself a deeply insightful critic of American art and culture.' James E. Hoopes, Distinguished Professor of History, Babson College, Massachusetts, USA 'A wonderfully knowledgeable book - historically detailed, theoretically versatile and highly perceptive in its skilful reading of a wide variety of visual texts (paintings, photographs, films). Tallack is able to render the history of New York's "visual imagination" as a dialogue between its constantly changing material appearance and the various changes in its visual representation. Although the book is focused on the transformation of late-19th-century Old New York into the 20th-century metropolis of visual excess, it traces the impact of history on the very conditions of seeing (as well as on the ways and instruments of perception) until that catastrophic moment of 9/11 that changed New York (as object and as image) forever.' Dr. Heinz Ickstadt, Prof. em., John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universitaet Berlin 'Douglas Tallack offers an informed critique of the ultimate American city in this thought-provoking and enjoyable reading of urban culture. ... Well-written, persuasively argued and wide-ranging in topics, 'New York Sights' would be a valuable asset to any American Studies course.' American Studies Today 'The great strength of Tallack's book lies in his sophisticated interpretations of individual images. ... I would highly recommend this book to Urban historians.' H-Net 'Tallack is a sophisticated interpreter of images.' American Studies