New York: Portrait of a City by Reuel Golden Taschen HK$560
There are many who have captured New York's essence in words. Mark Twain called the city 'a splendid desert' while F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, spoke of its 'wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world'. Maxim Gorky saluted a 'haughty pride'. Le Corbusier named it a 'beautiful catastrophe'. And E.B. White, in Stuart Little, noted, 'People in New York like to push each other'.
Taschen's coffee-table book, New York: Portrait of a City, captures the metropolis' essence in 500 photographs from the mid-19th century to the present day, many of which have not been published before. While the collection doesn't exactly undermine those previous verbal elegies, Reuel Golden's thoughtful selection, along with Taschen's trademark high-quality production, prove that a picture is often worth a thousand words.
Twain might have written all he liked about the place where 'the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race', but nothing evokes that paradox like a 1902 photograph of the holding pens at Ellis Island, where immigrants to America were vetted before arrival on Manhattan's shores.
Fitzgerald's 'wild promise' comes to life in an enigmatic shot of a flapper girl in the mid-1920s, legs curled around a lamp post and a dare in her smile, hanging up a poster for a carnival in the Village.
White's simple remark is given depth in the faces of countless New Yorkers who seem hurried, determined or hostile.