Jan Staller – Manhattan Project

Review by Paul Anderson ·

Jan Staller’s recent book Manhattan Project is a beautifully crafted collection of photographs taken at New York City construction sites between 2010 and 2024. In Staller’s photographs, steel beams and joints, cables, rebar, pipes, manifolds, connectors, and the like are stripped of their backgrounds and taken out of context. This isolates them, presenting them as aesthetic objects in their own right — sculptural forms worthy of close attention.

The images in Manhattan Project were created with a high level of craftsmanship. The forms, lines, and colors are clean, the compositions well considered, and combined with the high-quality printing it gives the images a distinctly graphic look. All of this leads to the sculptural aesthetic mentioned earlier — a rather rare quality in photography. The book’s foreword, written by Neil deGrasse Tyson, nicely summarizes this effect:

“In the Manhattan Project, which is itself a kind of x-ray view of what buildings are made of, urban photographer Jan Staller isolates, identifies and photographs fundamental elements of the construction worker’s craft. These elements ascend to a form of geometric art, imbued with life, where you can’t help think of I-beams and rebar as the bones and cartilage of the City…”

Bones and cartilage though they may be, these objects take on new meaning when excised from their primary habitat. Gone is the big city, gone are the cranes, gone are the construction workers — leaving you to contemplate and admire their shapes, designs, and forms. Yet the surrounding environment is not completely absent. In some images, cables, guys, and even a human hand descend from above or rise from below, hinting at the workers and infrastructure just out of view.

The pairing of images on opposing pages is well chosen and adds to the book’s quality. In one pairing, a robust steel structural element resembling a giant wedge glares menacingly across the page fold at a wide-flange beam with a welded bracket shaped like a giant gun. In another, more comical pairing, a lineup of vertical steel posts with end tabs sporting “eyes” peer across the fold at a pair of stolid, graffitied posts. A third, more elegant pairing shows a large collection of looping cables on a left-facing page opposite a collection of dangling cable ends on the right, all en pointe.

The book is well designed and printed on high-quality paper. Many images use a wide crop format that suits them well. The foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson is especially compelling given that both he and the photographer are native New Yorkers, and deGrasse Tyson brings that perspective to his text. Finally, this book celebrates the building construction process — a necessary part of every city’s infrastructure — which is a very different undertaking from the other Manhattan Project, the World War II program that developed the world’s first nuclear weapons.

This book will be of special interest to those who enjoy graphic design and compositional studies.

Paul Anderson is a photographer and digital artist based in Hermosa Beach, CA.

____________

Jan Staller – Manhattan Project

Photographer: Jan Staller (born Long Island, New York; currently resides in New York City

Language: English and French

Text: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brett Littman

Hardcover; printed on Sappi Magno Satin 170 gr paper; 11.02 × 9.45 inches (28 × 24 cm);120 pages; 85 color illustrations; ISBN 979-12-5460-095-5

____________

Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.