But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.Ī wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Īn epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. He includes one running feature-“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. Readers of the first volume-and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere-will feel immediately at home. Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths. History, local and global, unfolds in this fine gathering that represents a half-century and more than 2,300 issues. On that note, the menacing photograph of Christopher Walken, who was probably aiming to look pleasant, is alone worth the price of admission, not to mention striking photos of a host of other actors, including John Lithgow, Steve Buscemi, and Edie Falco. More than that, the editors reproduce material that speaks not just to passing moments and fashions, but also to constant editorial emphases, such as high-quality artwork and portraiture, with pages devoted to Ali MacGraw, Pam Grier, Grace Jones, and other zeitgeist-y figures. #Lowbrow vs highbrow movieThere are notes on the business and political ends of the enterprise, as well: Rupert Murdoch once owned the magazine but pretty much left it alone, while Michael Bloomberg was a constant source of fascination and copy-“the Bloombergification of New York,” wrote Justin Davidson in 2013, “isn’t complete yet, and won’t be for a generation.” There are a few greatest-hits bows, including, of course, Nik Cohn’s story “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the basis for the epochal movie Saturday Night Fever. Early on, for instance, comes Tom Wolfe’s “eyewitness report” of the birth of the “New Journalism,” for which he was largely responsible but for which New York made a welcoming vehicle. Write the current editors in their foreword, “Felker knew that a magazine grounded in the story of New York could also be a magazine about the whole world, and it is amazing how much history coursed through the city’s streets.” This oversized, overstuffed anthology makes a fine argument for just how true that is. In 1967, Clay Felker assembled a group of journalists and editors in his Manhattan apartment with big plans, and they made good on them from the very start, making of New York magazine not just a chronicle of the city, but also a kind of microcosmic view of everything important and interesting everywhere. A great magazine is commemorated with an equally top-flight anthology.
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