Discovering New York's Hidden Underworld: "Waterworks"
in the Lobby Gallery
New York's
water system is fairly overwhelming: each day, it provides over nine
million people with nearly 1.3 billion gallons of water. The photographer
Stanley Greenberg has documented the paths water takes throughout the
metropolis. Oliver Koerner von Gustorf on Greenberg's excursions,
which also shed light on the big city's collective memories, longings, and
fears.
Spillway, Pepacton Reservoir & Watering Facility, Tunnel No.2,
New York, Gelatin Silver Print, 1997
©Stanley Greenberg
Sometimes only one
step off the trodden path suffices to sharpen our perception for things
which we otherwise take a mere passing notice of. In this vein, curator
Liz Christensen's first visit to
Stanley Greenberg's studio began with an unexpected journey of discovery –
for the simple reason that she took a wrong turn after getting off the
elevator: "As I searched through the maze of this giant commercial
building in
DUMBO, I wandered by a beehive of sign printers, machinists and the like,
a variety of workshops with radios blaring rap and news in foreign
tongues. I eventually found my way back to Stanley's door and his part of
this universe, but afterwards was struck by the appropriateness of the
experience. My sideline through the building echoed something about
Stanley's approach to his work, one that has to do with his fascination
with structures hidden within something else, structures that are an
integral part of how the everyday world works."
Stilling Basin, Neversink Reservoir
New York, Gelatin Print 1999
©Stanley Greenberg
The gates to New
York's underworld are located behind the brick facades of pumping
stations, in the tunnel entrances of large construction sites, or beneath
the reflective surfaces of water reservoirs in the nearby countryside:
while most artist photographers seek to capture people, buildings, or
well-known architectural landmarks in order to document life in the big
city,
Stanley Greenberg's eye is directed to more remote motifs.
Just as
Virgil guided Dante through the realm of the dead, Greenberg takes the
viewer by the hand and leads him through a kind of urban land of shadows –
to places in his home city that either lie hidden deep beneath the ground
or escape our gaze because we have no relationship to them. These are
"non-locations" whose architectural attributes go unnoticed and which
fulfill their function in places inaccessible to the public: power plants,
underground tunnels, machine halls, dams, ditches, cable shafts, gas
works. As integral components of the municipal infrastructure, they belong
to a gigantic system that permeates the metropolis like a web of arteries
and provides it with the energy to survive.
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City Tunnel No. 3
New York, Gelatin Silver Print, 1998
©Stanley Greenberg
Following
Invisible New York – The Hidden Infrastructure of the City
(1998), Greenberg's photo book
Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York's Hidden Water
Systems has recently been published. The works collected in this new
volume can currently be seen in the
exhibition of the same name at Deutsche Bank Lobby Gallery in New York. As
this year's recipient of the Architecture and Environmental Structures
Fellowship, jointly awarded by the
New York Foundation of the Arts and Deutsche Bank, the artist is
introducing a body of work that focuses on New York's drinking water
system.
On the surface, the hidden world Greenberg portrays in his
highly detailed black and white photographs offers an objective inventory
of urban architecture. At the same time, however, it invites the viewer on
a journey through the big-city myths and legends born throughout the
course of technological development.
Indeed, New York's water system is
fairly overwhelming: each day, it provides over nine million people with
nearly 1.3 billion gallons of water. Since 1830, its aqueducts, retaining
basins, pipes, and pumping stations have been constantly expanded, while
the latest tunnel construction, scheduled for completion in 2020,
constitutes the largest municipal building project worldwide.
While
Greenberg follows the paths the water takes from the dams and lakes in the
open countryside to the 800 foot-deep tunnels lying beneath the streets of
Brooklyn and Queens, the urban water worlds he portrays appear in a
strangely remote light. Empty and abandoned, they offer an odd testimony
both to progress and defeat, to current changes and the forgotten hopes of
past generations.
Croton Dam
New York, Gelatin Silver
Print, 1999
© Stanley Greenberg
The structures documented in Greenberg's Waterworks were built during a
period of time spanning well over a century. Despite this, the
contemporary examples bear astonishing resemblance to their older
counterparts left to deteriorate. Even while formal parallels to
O. Winston Link's photographs (more
here) of the last American steam railroad or the cool architectural
photographs of the German photographers
Bernd and Hilla Becher are evident, Greenberg has developed his own subtle
aesthetic.
In spite of his camera's distanced precision,
subterranean New York also recalls the film scenario of a dark, Romantic
Gotham City in Tim Burton's
Batman Returns (1993), in which the abandoned sewer system is
populated by the creatures of the vengeful "Penguin." It is perhaps no
accident that the arched dome of the
Croton Dam, built at the beginning of the twentieth century, resembles the
interior of a dusky cathedral, or that the monumental steel girders of the
City Tunnel N. 3, which will remain under construction for decades to
come, are reminiscent of the interior of an archaic technological
structure that could come out of a fantasy film.
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