Misc.: June 2004 Archives

A couple of weeks back, New York magazine featured an unusually large and extensive spread of photos from the new show at the Municipal Art Society, "Governor's Island: Lost and Found". The photos by Lisa Kereszi and Andrew Moore catalog the now deserted island which has been transferred from Federal control to New York State for the price of $1. The show consists of interiors and exteriors of the buildings on the island, all of which appear to be in reasonably good shape, though completely stripped of anything that wasn't locked down. Moore, a professor of photography at Princeton, has done some excellent architectural work and both interior and exterior images in this show. Kereszi stuck mainly to interiors, one of which I've displayed above. Oddly, in investigating her work, I ran across a portrait of a former co-worker of mine, Jabe Bloom, in Zing magazine.

We all seem to have a fascination with deserted habitats. I recently was in Nevada where ghost towns litter the desert and old Virginia City has been repopulated with gambling tourists. "Lost and Found" follows in the same vein as the recent Andreas Magdanz show of photographs of the Dienststelle Marienthal, a Cold War-era bunker in the former West Germany. Robert Polidori's Chernobyl photos, "Zones of Exclusion", also come to mind. These empty spaces, littered with the debris of former lives, are intimate portraits of people long gone.

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