Summer Days Staten Island

Description

Taken in the forgotten borough of Staten Island between 1983 and 1984, the photographs in Christine Osinski's (born 1948) Summer Days Staten Island create a portrait of working-class culture in an often overlooked section of New York City. Captured on Osinski's large format 4x5 camera as she wandered the island, her candid portraits of strangers, vernacular architecture and quotidian scenes reveal an invisible landscape within reach of the thriving metropolis of Manhattan. The neighborhoods that Osinski captured are devoid of the skyscrapers, swarms of pedestrians and choking masses of traffic that are a short ferry ride away. Instead, she captures kids riding bikes on open, empty streets, suburban homes with neatly tended yards and the small-town feel of New York's least populous borough. Accompanying the series of images is an essay by Paul Moakley, Time magazine's Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.

Osinski's subjects radiate a nostalgic realism, a sense of unposed documentation.--Jack Crager "American Photo Magazine" Seen now, the photographs show the island's game face, the one it turned to the outside world. Her subjects, whether children or adults, were home in their island redoubt, braced for whatever might come their way.--John Leland "The New York Times" The people pictured here were strangers to the photographer, met only in passing. Still, in the pages of this book, they emerge as friends and neighbors, unnamed and unforgettable.--Ellyn Kail "Feature Shoot" The photographs [preserve] calm, quiet summer days.--Jessica Leigh Hester "The Atlantic's CityLab" There is a tight formalism within the pages depicting an America that has vanished.--Brad Feuerhelm "American Suburb X" There's a lightness in [Osinski's] Staten Island work... the kind of humor and understanding you find in the work of the great street photographer Helen Levitt.--Rebecca Bengal "vogue.com" Though the work is 35 years old, created in the 1980's, it still feels fresh and interesting. Her black and white 4 x 5 capture of an often overlooked New York Borough shares intimate portraits focusing on a working class neighborhood that seemed very far away from the chaos of Manhattan.--Aline Smithson "LENSCRATCH" Today, the world of social media has us morphing certain images of New York City to our liking, often covering up reality with filters... What separates Osinski's book from this is not just the time period of the content, but her goal. It is a "fragmented journey," an exploration of a new neighborhood she called home that developed into a project.--Vera Penavic "Untapped Cities" Staten Island looks more like suburban New Jersey than it does any of New York's other boroughs. When photographer Christine Osinski moved there from Manhattan in 1982 she explored her new home by taking random walks with her camera. The sympathetic pictures she took of the working-class tract developments, the people who lived in them, and their automobiles are shown in her Summer Days Staten Island...She has a sharp eye for details--Angela Southern "Wall Street Journal"