Single Story Project Update and Artist Statement

We’ve been working very hard all spring on the Single Story project and have a lot to show for it as you can see in the grid below. We’ve shot 15 locations to date and with at least 35 more identified so far who knows when it will all be done. Many thanks to all who have helped and supported in so many ways.

Here is the Artist Statement for the project:

The last fifteen years or so have seen an enormous increase in the development and construction of new buildings in New York City, especially in downtown Manhattan’s East Village, Alphabet City, Lower East Side, and Bowery neighborhoods. Previously, buildings greater than six stories were less common between the Financial District and midtown. Today, it seems, tall buildings are sprouting everywhere, with little regard for existing fabric.

As a twenty five year resident of the East Village, I have witnessed these changes. And as a longtime architectural/environmental photographer, I am compelled to document them.

Among downtown’s new starchitect-designed towers and the ubiquitous six-story tenements that have long characterized my once working-class community, there exist increasingly rare specimens: buildings of a single story. In a part of the city that’s never been chic or sleek, these low-riders blended in with their tenement neighbors, but now stand as outliers—oddballs even. They no longer “fit” their surroundings.

Of particular interest to me, and in many ways this project’s point of germination, is the negative space these single-story buildings create. They open the street to the sky, providing a vista that can be enjoyed by all of us. With air rights, sunshine, and city views so valuable, and with the polarization of wealth having a direct impact on the area’s demographics, how much longer can these squat buildings stand?

The purpose of this project is to create a series of photographs that document every remaining single-story building in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhoods, bounded by Broadway to the west, the FDR Drive to the east, 14^th Street to the north, and Canal Street to the south. The photographs are made without people to allow the focus of the work to remain on the buildings and their surroundings. They are black-and-white images to emphasize the forms and negative space.

I am recording each of these single-story buildings in this transitional time before they are replaced and forgotten, their corresponding negative spaces filled in. It is my intention this series will become a historical document, that it will be collected and published in book form.

I am employing traditional analogue photographic processes: black-and-white, silver-halide-coated sheet film shot with a 5” x 7” view camera. The negatives produced will be printed at both contact size (5” x 7”) and enlarged (16” x 20”).

This method of shooting sheet film in a large-format camera is one I have used since I became a photographer.

Single Story is inspired by the work of August Sander, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Lynne Cohen, Joel Sternfeld, Ozu Yasujiro, and Wim Wenders.

+ high-res version

Uni Architecture’s Cambridge Houses Picked As One Of Dwell’s Favorites

Very nice surprise to see this on Instagram, case thank you Dwell!

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To celebrate reaching 500k followers today, we’ll be posting our editors’ all-time favorite photos from Dwell over the years! The windows are strategically placed to maximize light and privacy. #architecture #exterior #dwell Photo by @adam_friedberg Architecture by Chaewon Kim + Beat Schenk Location : Cambridge, Massachusetts Originally Published in March 2007

A photo posted by Dwell (@dwellmagazine) on Apr 4, 2016 at 3:08pm PDT

Personal Projects Update part 3 – Single Story

For the last 2 decades we’ve seen enormous change in lower Manhattan. The area around here has been so heavily and quickly developed it’s nearly unrecognizable from how it looked in the 80’s and early 90’s. Seeing this has sparked many of our projects including New Bowery (Architecture>New Bowery at adamfriedberg.com) and the Empty Lots.

The Single Story Project is a more recently started one, linked to the Empty Lots in many ways, and coming from the idea of air rights. How are these structures still here?

Not long ago there were very few tall buildings downtown, and especially on the Lower East Side where there were zoning laws with height restrictions preventing them from going up. Now they are everywhere. Yet there are a few oddballs holding out, buildings that were different even before the new towers. Single Story structures in Manhattan, the most vertical city in America. Let’s look at them.

Rite Aid, 81 1st Avenue, NYC

Personal Projects Update part 2 – Empty Lots

Since 1999 we’ve been shooting empty lots in NYC, mostly around us in the East Village, as a personal interest documentary project. After the crash in 2008 the project slowed a bit but recently it’s been revived.

Most of the work we do is architectural in nature, shooting the built and constructed environment, a large portion of that is urban, so for various reasons the urban unbuilt and unconstructed became interesting. Additionally these lots are disappearing quickly. While 20 years ago they were commonplace downtown now it’s almost rare to see one with the current building boom. One day soon there will be none left and Manhattan will be saturated with buildings.

When this project started a conscious decision was made – to use the most to shoot the least. And so we shot and are still shooting these lots on 8×10 sheet film. It’s not easy, fast, or cheap, but it is fun. And satisfying.

Here’s a recent one from East 4th Street

Empty Lot on East 4th Street near the Bowery

Personal Projects Update part 1 – Samasthiti Project at AYSNYC

Linked to an earlier ongoing project at AYSNYC (the video interviews mentioned in a previous post) we’ve been working on another yoga based project since the Fall of 2015, this one called the Samasthiti Project.

Samasthiti is the basic standing asana in Ashtanga. In Yoga Mala Sri K Pattabhi Jois describes the pose thusly: “To begin, join the legs together, with the heels and big toes touching, push the chest up, lower the head slightly, and stand straight, gazing at the tip of the nose; this is called Samasthiti, which means standing up in a straight line.” Sama means same or equal, sthiti means strong or steady.

Samasthiti is the first pose of Ashtanga, the start and end of each vinyasa, and in many ways the most telling of all the asana.

For the project we are photographing each student at AYSNYC in a series of 4 still photographs in Samasthiti (front, sides, and back). The students will be photographed once every 6 months over the coming years (as we are doing for the video interviews).

One of the purposes of this is for the students to have a record of themselves to look back on and document some of the changes they are all going through as their practice develops. Another is to show the public in general what “yoga bodies” and yogis actually look like, that all types of people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities are practicing Ashtanga.

We’ve decided to shoot this project entirely in black and white, on large format 5″x7″ sheet film. That’s exciting for us as we’re old fashioned large format film camera nerds, but also have found the students are very excited to see that we’re shooting film on these huge cameras.

Also the quality of the results is quite compelling.

So for now here are 2 images from the first round of shooting: