TG  TERRAIN GALLERY

This Great, Diverse City: How Should We See It?
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHS OF NEW YORK CITY

John Stern

From the
Flatiron Building

Manhattan

7 x10.5 in.

$350 - framed
$250 - unframed

John Stern

When my wife Faith and I were in the lobby of the Flatiron Building looking intently at an exhibition of photographs depicting its construction in 1902, an official-looking gentleman standing nearby invited us to "see something special." He took us to the 19th floor and forward to where the building narrows—and behold! there was this unmatched view looking down on Fifth Avenue and Broadway. I was so stirred by the size and manyness of what was in front of me that I just stood looking, and looking. Then I took this photograph. There is a drama here of hardness and softness, of things in motion and things at rest. The buildings, pavements, and yellow taxis are hard and represent the order we want to have in our lives, and these qualities are completed by the softer diagonals, curves, and people in motion and seated at tables, representing the freedom we also want to have. The people, while clearly personal, are related to the impersonal geometry of streets and buildings, and people's shadows and the long shadow of the Flatiron Building have some mystery. It is a particular scene that, while quintessentially New York, has the wide world's opposites.
   
Bank Rock Bridge

Central Park

9 x 12 in.

$325 - framed
$225 - unframed
John Stern
   

Umpire Rock

Central Park

7 x 10.5 in.

$350 - framed
$250 - unframed

John Stern

In this photograph of Umpire Rock in Central Park near West 63rd Street—so called because it provides something like grandstand viewing of the Hecksher Playgrounds below—there is a drama of hardness and softness, of humanity and geology. Each person here is a self-contained point, yet is related to rocks 500 million years old. Each person is himself or herself, with bones and flesh and thoughts, and each has to do with that ancient rock which—though obviously hard—has also been forced into undulations by extraordinary heat and pressure within the earth. So in this place "there is a oneness of quiet and tumult," with people sitting quietly and moving about on a rock that is at rest but speaks of powerful forces that forged its shape of now. As with any particular instance of New York's geography, one can get to the meaning of the whole wide world in which these opposites exist.
   

On the Lake

Central Park

9 x 12 in.

$325 - framed
$225 - unframed

John Stern

There is a drama here of separation and junction, with one couple looking at another couple, who are concentrated on each other as they take a photograph. The two couples are personal, yet are joined with the impersonality of rowboats, water, and reflections of autumn color. We are each separate in our own physiology and thoughts, yet oh, how we long to be joined with another person. As Aesthetic Realism explains, and this picture exemplifies, the world is the third partner in the relation of any two people.


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Terrain Gallery - 141 Greene Street - New York, NY 10012 - 212-777-4490