Urban Montages

Composite photography is an excellent format for capturing the architecture and atmosphere of the city. For me, the city's vastness and complexity often evades the single-image single-moment approach. My urban montages are kinetic, frenetic, like the city itself -- even in the relative calm of a courthouse or a Broadway theater. Everything shifts, everything's dynamic. Our place inside it is always uncertain.

All images © 2017 Marilyn Stern / ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Chrysler Building and Schoolbus
February 2017

This photomontage could also be titled "Chrysler Building Yearns for the Sky." A discrete joke: When it was built there was intense competition in New York City to build the tallest skyscraper. Upon completion in 1929, the Chrysler Bldg was the tallest. But "less than a year after it opened to the public on May 27, 1930, the Chrysler Building was surpassed in height by the Empire State Building." (Wikipedia) Maybe it was karma for the developer cheating the architect out of his fee. Sound familiar?

Snowy Tree on Third Avenue with Grillwork and Neon Icicles
February 2017

Winter's last hurrah?

Pencil Towers from East 23rd Street

March 2016

There goes the neighborhood.

The Cowcatcher (Flatiron and Moon)

February 2015

“I found myself agape, admiring a sky-scraper—the prow of the Flat-iron Building, to be particular, ploughing up through the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue...” 

H.G. Wells 1906

Miraculously the so-called "cowcatcher" has stayed intact since

the Flatiron'scompletion in 1902.

Union Square with Discarded Christmas Trees and Contrails

January 2015

Crane, East 23rd Street

April 2014

Walter Kerr Theater Interior

April 2014

Jury Dury (60 Center Street Rotunda)

July 2014

Cavalry Church Door, Winter

February 2010

photomontages © 2017 Marilyn Stern

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED