RAY MORTENSON likes to call these images “modern pictures.” In this new work, Mortenson looks at the city as he walks through it. Light and shadow, angular skyscrapers and stairwells in stark black and white honor twentieth century Modernism. References to Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy, and Renger-Patsch come to mind. The camera is often pointed skyward to highlight the vertical scale and visual complexity of Manhattan’s architecture.

Recently reviewed in The New Yorker, Mortenson's show is on display through the rest of the week.

Mortenson's small black-and-white photographs of Manhattan have so many precedents that they already look comfortably familiar. Bernice Abbott's pictures of the city in the nineteen-thirties provide a key template for his images of sky-scrapers sweeping upward. Even if the buildings here are virtually featureless International Style monoliths, the work has a classic sense of restraint and a traditionalist's eye for elegant composition. But there's nothing retro to Mortenson's cityscapes (nearly all from 2008); they're muscular and crisp and smartly varied, including pictures of the underside of an overpass, a lone skater at Rockefeller Center, and incidental side-walk shadows that put hulking monuments into perspective. Through May 29. (Borden, 560 Broadway at Prince St. 212-431-0166.)

A wonderful array of photographs of New York by gallery artists: Tina Barney, Fred Cray, Jim Dow, Macduff Everton, Lee Friedlander, Ray Mortenson, Martin Parr, John Pfahl, Larry Sultan, Neil Winokur





A number of top galleries specializing in photography have joined forces this summer to present NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHS, a citywide exhibition.

Over a dozen gallery shows will feature iconic New York photographs, photographers, and sites. Laurence Miller, Howard Greenberg, Bonni Benrubi, Pace/MacGill, Deborah Bell, Yancey Richardson, Hasted Hunt, Danziger Projects, Edwynn Houk, Robert Mann, Julie Saul, and Yossi Milo are the other participating galleries.

These exhibitions will all open more or less simultaneously on June 4th and run through the summer. See them all—collect valuable prizes.

EXHIBITIONS, ONGOING

EXHIBITIONS, OPENING