New York

This 2010 monograph gathers Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of New York City, the metropolis he photographed obsessively from the 1890s through the 1930s. Over those decades it turned from a city of brownstones into a modern skyline of skyscrapers.

Art historian Bonnie Yochelson selected the images and wrote the accompanying essay, placing Stieglitz's work against the commercial and architectural upheaval of the period: the harbor ferries, the elevated railways, and landmarks including the Flatiron Building and the original Madison Square Garden, several of which the photographs record not long before their demolition. Stieglitz made much of the work from the windows of his own apartments, a vantage he returned to across four decades as the skyline around him kept changing. Skira Rizzoli published the hardcover in 2010.

Stieglitz (1864-1946) was the most influential American photography impresario of his generation: founder of the Photo-Secession movement, editor of Camera Work, and proprietor of the 291 gallery, which introduced European modernism and photography as fine art to American audiences. He was married to the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he also photographed extensively. His New York pictures, made across his career rather than as a single project, form one of the most sustained photographic studies of a single city by one photographer.