Life of the City — New York Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art

The vitality of New York City - its energy, ambition, and beauty - has long inspired great photographers, from Berenice Abbott to Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model to Lee Friedlander. Composed of works selected from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and accompanied by a chapter of writings by notable observers of the city, Life of the City celebrates the great and continuing tradition of photography about New York. The book explores the drama of New York's architecture, from its cavernous brick canyons and towering stone pinnacles to its humble storefronts and tenements. It captures the city's glittering lights - outside on the skyline and in the flash of speeding cars, inside at nightclubs, jazz rooms, society galas, and parties. And of course there are New Yorkers themselves, the city's bakers and builders, its politicians and policemen, its nighttime strollers, its morning crowds of pedestrians hurrying to work, its children so beautifully memorialized by Helen Levitt, and its solitary individuals who, in the photographs of Cindy Sherman, seem to be living out a cultural myth of what it means to belong in and to one of America's greatest urban centers.