Roosevelt Station

Roosevelt Station, a new monograph published by Perimeter Editions is now available online and in stores.

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From Perimeter Editions: “Drawing on a series of photographs made between 2019 and 2020 in the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street train station in Queens, New York, Roosevelt Station proves at once mundane and almost ethereal in its tenor. Here, New York photographer David Rothenberg captures his subjects – commuters, airport-bound travellers, panhandlers, missionaries and others – awash in the radiant, cathedral-like light of the station’s concourse, these otherwise candid, rush-hour images assuming an otherworldly, theatrical guise.

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In the book’s essay, curator and writer David Campany describes the act of photographing within such a building as Roosevelt Station – its unique quality of light deriving from artist Tom Patti’s 2004 glass installation Night Passage – as broaching both ‘reportage and theatre’. ‘The social spaces of advanced capitalism are ... caught somewhere between surveillance and spectacle,’ he writes. ‘That is to say, such spaces are at once traps and stages, realms of private introspection and conspicuous public display.’ The minutiae of the everyday commute morphs into micro-drama when bathed in glowing magenta, orange, green and blue. While referencing Walker Evans’ classic subway portraits, Rothenberg’s hyper-observant photographs take the archetype somewhere unmistakably new. In a cultural moment struck by crisis and division, these images feel like a unifying treatise. No matter who they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going, these commuters walk the same concourses and climb the same steps – each illuminated by a celestial glow.”

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PHOTO 2021 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize

Roosevelt Station was selected as the winner of the inaugural PHOTO 2021 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize. The project will be published as a monograph by Perimeter Editions in February 2021. A special edition with a signed archival inkjet print is now available for pre-order.

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from Perimeter Books:

Drawing on a series of photographs made between 2019 and 2020 in the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street train station in Queens, New York, Roosevelt Station proves at once mundane and almost ethereal in its tenor. Here, New York photographer David Rothenbergcaptures his subjects – commuters, airport-bound travellers, panhandlers, missionaries and others – awash in the radiant, cathedral-like light of the station’s concourse, these otherwise candid, rush-hour images assuming an otherworldly theatrical guise.

In the book’s essay, curator and writer David Campany describes the act of photographing such a building as Roosevelt Station – its unique quality of light deriving from artist Tom Patti’s 2004 glass installation Night Passage, which is integrated into the windows of the station’s main glass wall – as broaching both ‘reportage and theatre’. ‘The social spaces of advanced capitalism are … caught somewhere between surveillance and spectacle,’ he writes. ‘That is to say, such spaces are at once traps and stages, realms of private introspection and conspicuous public display.’ The minutiae of the everyday commute morphs into micro-drama when bathed in glowing magenta, orange, green and blue.

While referencing Walker Evans’ subway portraits among other historical examples, Rothenberg’s hyper-observant photographs take the archetype somewhere unmistakably new. In a cultural moment struck by crisis and division, these images feel like kind of a unifying treatise. No matter who they are, where they’ve been and where they’re going, these commuters walk the same concourses and climb the same steps – each illuminated by a celestial glow.