Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages [Hardcover]

City Stagesoffers a paean to the visionary potential of large-format, black-and-white photography as well as to the vibrancy of the cultural landscape at a transitional moment--a moment in which our very relationship to that landscape is increasingly mediated by omnipresent screens. Over the past decade, Pillsbury has built three extensive bodies of work--Screen Lives, Hoursand City Stages--that deal with contemporary metropolitan life and the passage of time. Working with black-and-white 8 x 10 film and long exposures, Pillsbury captures a range of psychologically charged experiences in the urban environment, from the isolationism of personal technology to crowded museums, parades, cathedrals and even protests. Shot in New York, Paris, London and other major cities, the rendering of iconic landmarks and interior spaces in his images provides a stage-like setting for the performance of human activity. This monograph gathers for the first time selections from all three bodies of work.The city that emerges from Matthew Pillsbury’s photographs of New York — collected in a new book, “City Stages,” to be published by Aperture in October — is a ghost town: not an empty ghost town of deserted streets, but a much more literal phantom world in which human figures are captured, in almost spectral fashion, walking through public spaces, their bodies blurred by long exposures. “A lot of photography is about asserting a presence,” said Mr. Pillsbury, 39, who was raised in Paris but moved to New York City in the early 1990s. “These photographs are more about the evanescence of our lives and show human beings as fleeting essences that are moving through a landscape.”