New York City Pictures - A Beauty Or A Beast?

Stepping outside the familiar tourist scenes and looking at New York as a place where people live and work opens up a range of views that only reveal themselves for an instant. Yet, they can tell a story with more fiber and truth than casual visitors can know.

According to fine art photographer Deborah Julian, she just happened to be up early one winter morning when she looked out her window and saw another woman stretching in another high rise. The city was just awakening. A ghostly tanker pushes its steel hull through up the East River toward Hell Gate. A thin layer of fresh snow gilds the border.

A photographer of streets and urban landscapes, she seldom lets the final image settle before adding artful touches that enhance and clarify her pictures. In this one, the image is almost too beautiful and layered with ghostly surrealism.

This one of the ways you can look at New York. It's far from the only way.

Even under glamorous locations, like Bloomingdales, Rockefeller Center and Macy's, New York's subway system is probably the filthiest and least user friendly in the world. Bungled by managers rewarded for political connections ahead of merit, the subway benefits from a lack of competition, especially from cars, because the streets are so congested.

In Between Two Universes (Montague Street, Brooklyn), a woman leaves the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights and enters New York's underground city. True, the system is fast and safe, but at a sacrifice to cleanliness and air quality no other city I'm aware of accepts.

Contrasted with 5:00 am Manhattan Sunrise, you can see how the question of New York's beauty might be answered otherwise.

57th Street Subway Station highlights the simple, but roughed up lines of an efficient subway line used by almost everyone, even the Mayor.

As you can see, even one fine art photographer's view can be spiked with contrasts. 

New York City can be as colorfully beautiful as a bucolic pond, as in Daydreamers (Central Park, NYC) or marked by fanciful illusions. Two young girls pass an autumn afternoon among the reflections in pond, just yards from the traffic jams at 59th and Fifty. Elsewhere in Central Park, a fantasy seems to be enacted as a man takes flight in the direction of of a woman under the shimmering Minton Tiles. 

East River View, seen from mid-river along the promenade on Roosevelt Island, the river seems graceful as it washes beneath the Queensboro Bridge, the United Nations in the distance. Even the pigeons seem at peace. But on the other side of Manhattan, in Waiting For The Light, we see the extreme alienation of New York street corners. No one in the sour looking crowd, not even the young women who've been shopping together at Victoria's Secret, are alert to the others around them.

Pictures of New York can isolate beauty or increase the unpleasant contrasts.

The question, Is New York City Beautiful? remains eternally unanswered in Deborah Julian's Passing (Brighton Beach), a deceptively simple scene for an elevated subway station in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood Neil Simon wrote about and where Neil Diamond also grew up, now a gritty Russian community that calls itself "Moscow On The Sea."

An elegantly dressed woman with sculpted hair being blown by an arriving train is set on chewing gum matted platform. What looks like a ghost train of shadowy figures inside arrives. 

Is it beautiful or something else? Yes, and yes.