Seaport: New York's Vanished Waterfront: Photographs from the Edwin Levick Collection
- Book Review,
by Phillip Lopate
From Publishers Weekly
Here’s the perfect companion volume to Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Forecasts, Feb. 9). A pictorial celebration of New York’s maritime heritage, the book reproduces more than 100 black-and-white photographs from the vast collection of vintage photos and negatives that the Frederick Lewis News Agency bequeathed to the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Va., starting in 1955. Chief among the photographers represented in the collection was British émigré Edwin Levick, who with his assistants took pictures of many New York scenes in the early 1900s but seemed to have a special fondness for the waterfront. As Thomas Moore, the senior curator of photography at the Mariners’ Museum, observes in his preface, "Levick’s images capture the energy of a confident nation unflinchingly marching into a new and promising century." Not simply a distillation of Waterfront, Lopate’s introductory essay, "The Port of New York in Its Heyday," pays ample tribute to Levick and the other photographers who recorded a now-vanished world a century ago.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In a companion volume to his recent tour de force, Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan [BKL F 1 04], Lopate extends his revelatory study of New York City's once bustling, now neglected waterfront with a sparkling introduction to a sterling collection of maritime photographs, most taken by Edwin Levick, an Englishman who grew up in Suez, where the canal was his playground and ships were his fascination. He arrived in New York in 1900 and covered the city's waterfront until his death in 1929. Levick had a great eye and an intrepid approach, framing strongly patterned compositions from deck and shore, always on the lookout for what Lopate calls any "anecdotal possibility." Here in sharply focused, thrillingly vibrant black-and-white photographs are sailors, upper-class passengers and exhausted immigrants, and dockworkers loading and unloading cargo--bananas, sulfur, lumber, cattle--as well as magnificent yachts, ferries, barges, luxury liners, fishing boats, and battleships. Here, in short, is an elegant visual record of the busiest port in the world in its heyday, feeding a robust and burgeoning metropolis. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Max Kozloff, author of New York: Capital of Photography
A lively read and a visual treat.
Book Description
A stunning collection of photographs capturing the pinnacle of maritime Manhattan. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Port of New York was the center of a huge maritime enterprise. Through this hub passed vessels and cargoes of every description, heading to or arriving from anywhere and everywhere around the globe. For much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was here that America's commerce with Europe and Central and South America converged. In this busiest port in the world, seasoned sailors and fishermen, international traders, muscled longshoremen, barge brats, and yachters shaped and shared New York's waterfront world. By 1960 maritime New York had greatly diminished, eclipsed by more efficient operations elsewhere. Fortunately, a small cadre of commercial photographers documented the dynamic social, economic, and political forces in the heyday of the wharves, waterways, and waterfront markets, capturing for the ages the gritty and sometimes glamorous life of the docks and their environs. 137 duotones.
About the Author
Edwin Levick (1869-1929) worked as a commercial photographer in New York for forty years. Phillip Lopate, the author of three critically acclaimed essay collections, two novels, and numerous other works, is Adams Chair and professor of English at Hofstra University.
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