New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York [Paperback]

'An immensely learned and thoughtful exploration of how one city has been perceived and imagined. His book is a truly impressive achievement of scholarship and contemplation.' Professor Stephen J. Whitfield, Department of American Studies, Brandeis University"New York' as Douglas Tallack astutely notes, is the only proper adjective for New York - a city that requires not a singleness of perspective but the kind of multifarious response offered here. An extraordinarily rich and varied account of the city as a visual text.' Professor Ian F. A. Bell, University of Keele'Critical theorist Tallack masterfully investigates the urban visuality of Manhattan to determine how the processes of seeing and image making were altered by the social and material transformations that occurred during the city's modernization. An intriguing alternative to traditional art histories.'Ilene Susan Fort, Curator of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art'My high expectations of

When we think 'city', we think New York. From downtown to uptown, no other urban space can claim such a famous skyline or such intensely varied street-life. It is a city that dazzles with its constant visual stimulation.Lavishly illustrated, New York Sights considers the formative period when a nostalgically evoked 'Old New York' transformed into 'New New York', ultimately becoming the modernist city of the twentieth century. Drawing on photography, film, and painting, the author considers the changing skyline, the grid-plan, the growth of the elevated railroad, the homes of the leisure classes, and city streets. Among the artists discussed are: Alfred Stieglitz, Jacob Riis, Georgia O'Keefe, John Sloan, Childe Hassam, and George Bellows. He also looks at the post World War II-period and the shocking visual prospect of a New York skyline without the Twin Towers.

Douglas Tallack is Professor of American Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham. Among his publications are The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story; Twentieth-Century America and City Sites: Multi-Media Essays on New York and Chicago. Professor Tallack has twice won the Arthur Miller Prize for the best American Studies article of the year, and has published many essays on American intellectual and cultural history, and critical theory.