The Edge of the City
2002
£40.00
The Edge of the City by Charles Pratt. First edition (2002). First impression. Large format hardback in new condition. No markings. This is a new book. Dust jacket in removable protective sleeve. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
About The Edge of the City
As a photographer best known for his images of the “beautiful landscape”, and indeed one most interested in nature’s beauty itself, Charles Pratt found himself mesmerized by the steady advance of New York City into its surrounding, natural environment.
For fifteen years, beginning in 1954, Pratt pursued an ambitious agenda to comprehensively photograph “the edges of the city.” So, responding to predictions that New York would inevitably merge with Boston and Washington D.C. to form a sprawling megalopolis, Pratt photographed New York’s periphery with a feeling of urgency, searching out a variety of places that he felt were at risk of vanishing.
He interpreted the idea of the city’s edge with some latitude and, on a surface level, the photographs are also disparate in their subject matter. As they range from the waterfront and harbor to highways and railroad yards; from quiet residential streets then to the neighboring New Jersey meadows. Collectively, these photographs become an oblique and sometimes contradictory portrait of the city where Pratt spent most of his life. And while they provide a counterpoint to his nature photographs, certain images suggest a degree of overlap, capturing places where nature maintains a tentative hold at the sidelines of the urban milieu. The Edges of the City was published as a book posthumously.
