Deconstructing New York
by Ishaan Barrett
In a cozy, east-side gallery near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City comes alive in photographs. Jennifer Williams’ exhibition Deconstructing New York at the Robert Mann Gallery features a pedestrian’s view of the city, capturing architecture and the built environment through abstraction and careful focus. Alongside this transformative presentation, Williams’ photo series The Decorated Shed: East Village and Lower East Side explores “Streeteries” from the pandemic. Remnants from a time where eating outdoors was the norm—and not simply preference—Williams’ photographs excise these “Streeteries” from their surroundings, highlighting the vibrant personalities of these constructions. Williams’ photography is at full strength across these separate foci, exploring both the concreteness and ephemerality of New York as a living, breathing city.
In Deconstructing New York, Williams prints colored photos on top of one another, carefully cutting out portions of reprinted segments to build depth and structure within each scene. This practice of layering and removing drives the central purpose of Williams’ first exhibition. By deconstructing the architecture of the city, Williams’ makes the built environment more accessible to pedestrians and city dwellers. In a place where towering edifices dominate the skyline, Williams’ photographic lens brings the obtrusive, linear forms of buildings into perspective, allowing viewers to reestablish their relationship with New York City’s urban jungle.
In these images, glass becomes almost liquid, and the architecture of the city becomes abstract (figures 1A and 2A). Such a feat is only achieved through the decisive exclusion of people from these images, where the idea of vacancy allows the viewer to place themselves within Williams’ photographic world. I had the chance to email with Williams about her work and the stylistic motivations employed in her Midtown photography.
I believe there are lots of people represented in the photos—while not physically there, they are heavily implied. The pictured structures were all built to be used by people on a day to day basis. It's up to the viewer to imagine who these people are and how they interact with the spaces.
As Williams notes, the presence of people underlies her photography; while they might not appear on the surface, the architecture in Williams’ work is underwritten by a human touch that has distinctly designed buildings precisely for urban dwellers.
"The midtown structures reveal their use in more subtle ways. Their inherent regularity highlights moments of use—their unending patterns altered by human intervention. Details like moved curtains, blinds lifted up or down, windows open, or even lights on (and the different colors/types of lights) are enough to elicit a sense of anticipated or continued occupancy." (Jennifer Williams)
By contrasting “inherent regularity” and “unending patterns” against noticeable “human intervention” and “details,” Williams subtly centers the ephemeral figure of the human being within her work. People might not be ostensibly visible, but their habitation of these midtown spaces endures. In this way, Williams’ photography once again put humans in direct conversation with architecture and the built environment of New York. Complexifying the built environment further, Williams’ photos consistently juxtapose old and new buildings, emphasizing a changing city that is characterized by fundamentally different architectural styles (figures 3A, 4A, and 5A). Pairing linear form with organic artistic flair, historical and contemporary buildings collide at center, foregrounding the role of New York as a modern city. This discussion of temporality is not confined to Williams’ unique photographic reliefs; her focus on the changing landscape of Hudson Yards stands out along the north wall of the gallery.
Spanning six feet in height and width, Williams’ sculptural piece Manhattan: Hudson Yards is the remarkable centerpiece of her larger exhibition. It pulls together a variety of photographic representations of Hudson Yards into a single place, highlighting the dynamic waterfront of the city as a place of constant flux (figure 7A). By including pedestrians and city dwellers within its focus, Manhattan: Hudson Yards achieves something new and unexpected: it centers the individual and the vivacious collective of New York City as drivers of urban change. Earlier photography that excludes city residents from view pulls the towering cityscape towards the ground. It makes the distant elements of the city intimate. Williams achieves a similar feat in the largest piece of her exhibition but does so with an attention to the humanistic aspect of the urban experience. Architecture and city planning do not exist in a vacuum, but an appreciation for the artistic qualities of the city need not center the political underpinnings of urban development. Rather, an appreciation for the beauty of a “deconstructed” city can center the individual, while an attention to urban change requires a focus on the collective.
Williams illustrates a remarkable push and pull between two fundamental aspects of urban life: the microscopic elements of city living and the perhaps unpredictable behaviors of greater Manhattan. In this way, Deconstructing New York emboldens the idea that Manhattan can be both commanding and aesthetic in its built environment, simultaneously shaped by its residents. The Decorated Shed: East Village and Lower East Side takes on a similar practice, exploring disappearing remnants of the city from the height of COVID-19. By discussing disappearing spaces in a post-pandemic world, Williams once again highlights the changing city through a distinctly different lens. Each photograph captures the unique personality of these “Streeteries,” portraying them as sacred reminders of places where socialization and community endured despite social distancing.
Vibrant colors, graffiti, and various building techniques make each of these “Streeteries” valuable and distinct (figures 1B, 2B, and 3B). Once again, Williams decided to largely exclude people from her imagery, but their presence lurks.
"The hand is more evident in the restaurant sheds—the cast of characters spans the crew that cobbled them together then altered them to keep out vermin/be up to code (or add A/C, plants, [etc.]), the staff who left trash bags nearby or swept up around them, hand-painted signs telling the greater public what to do (or not to do), random trash left by strangers, [and] the folks tagging and graffitiing them, often leaving a trace of politics at the time. Housing restaurant patrons becomes almost secondary." (Jennifer Williams)
Patrons as “almost secondary” emphasizes the role of people in the construction of these “Streeteries” rather than their clear-cut purpose: outdoor eating. This functionality of space comes perhaps secondary to the many individual choices—made by a diverse “cast of characters”—that made these “Streeteries” unique, lively, and artful. Most notably, however, Williams’ photographic and artistic technique chooses to take these “Streeteries” out of their surroundings instead placing them on a white background. Such a practice, supplemented by Williams’ explicit exclusion of human figures, compounds the effect of her photography as a practice of preservation and celebration. She treats each of these buildings as art rather than as a collection of objects; while each may serve a similar purpose, their diversity casts them as an extension of important places rather than temporary spaces. This difference between place and space remains central to Williams’ broad exploration of these “Streeteries” (figure 4B). Merely capturing one of these buildings might solely emphasize the functionality of these objects as spaces where restaurants can host guests outdoors. But as a collective, these areas serve as places where memory, community, and urban life can flourish and thrive rather than simply exist.
Williams’ exhibition in its separate components are remarkable as they stand. But together, they converse. The abstractness of architecture, changing edges of the city at Hudson Yards, and historicity of places brought into existence by the pandemic portray a city in constant flux and tension. Pandemic-era relics of New York and new built places share a common artistic element that is deserving of both prolonged focus and permanent, photographic preservation. Through Deconstructing New York, Williams shows that there is much to love—and perhaps critique—about the city. But at center stage, Williams shows that at the threshold of change, beauty endures.
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Fair Use Statement:
All images are by the author. They have been obtained and reproduced with permission from the Robert Mann Gallery. Digital copies are available from the author upon request and upon further permission by Jennifer Williams and the Robert Mann Gallery.
Appendices:
A: Deconstructing New York
B: The Decorated Shed: East Village and Lower East Side