

NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT is a large-scale photographic survey of everyday life on Manhattan’s great public commons — its streets and sidewalks — from Whitehall and South Street at the foot of the island on up to where Broadway recrosses Ninth Avenue at its very top, and from the FDR Drive on the East River to the West Side Highway on the Hudson.

Conceived and executed on a scale commensurate with the city itself, NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT’s eleven thousand plus digital panoramas catch Manhattan’s elusive, ephemeral, and often exhilarating sense of life in the interplay of people, traffic, and architecture on the island’s eleven thousand plus street corners.

NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT was photographed in the long summer season — March through November — of 2006, a moment in the city's history now remembered as the pinnacle of the 30-year boom that began to unravel the following year and collapsed altogether in 2008.

Shot, processed, and catalogued digitally from start to finish, NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT is simultaneously an archive for scholars and researchers, a resource for businesses, residents, and visitors, and a feast for the eyes for lovers of New York everywhere.

NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT is currently available for viewing in the 44 HTML galleries on this site (scroll down or click here to go directly to the galleries).

Enhancements are planned that will make NEW YORK IN PLAIN SIGHT fully searchable by both location and content, and will also provide a map-based user interface. Both a downloadable version and a monograph with an accompanying disk are also planned.