Lost city: portraits of New York before 9/11 changed everything

Of all the cities of the world, could well be the most photographed in New York. The Brooklyn Bridge; Times Square; Central Park; Coney Island; Harlem; the Lower East Side; wonderful public library Lions; the 59th Street Bridge; buildings Chrysler, Woolworth, Empire State; and it continues. Sometimes it seems as if we've seen all possible views of the city, in each of the New York countless, countless forms - taken from all imaginable angles and that there is no way of experiencing again a familiar place.

And then, suddenly, we have a new way to see the world's largest city - and remember, once again, how variegated, and what beautiful is New York.

In the 1990s, at the insistence of his friends for a long time and gallerists, Phyllis Wrynn and Mitch Freidlin, a photographer born in Bronx called George Forss began photographing New York rooftops, towers-location - private balconies - to which very few people had access. In the next decade, Forss created a remarkable Chronicle of a New York invisible - a new New York - captured from a unique point of view. The resulting images, collectively known as "The Access project," offered unexpected glimpses of monuments that we thought we knew, while rethinking and, in a sense, revitalize the most emblematic urban landscape of the world.

[This gallery has 15 photos of "acceso". Find more here.]

Finally, it should be noted that Forss took its last "project access" photos of the year before the attack against the twin towers 2001. Not only New York physically transformed in the Decade and a half since Forss stopped the unique search and caches, since the shoot, but the entire atmosphere in the country has changed. There is simply no way, for example, it would allow to Forss shooting from the JFK airport air traffic control tower simply because an acquaintance who worked for the port authority invited him up to check out the view.

In more than one, New York and America as a whole is less free for 15 years. Seen in that light, photographs of George Forss are a celebration of and an elegy for a lost world.

George Forss (b. 1941) lives and works in Cambridge, New York. Visit him online at ForssBlog or in the Ginofor Gallery and see and buy his work in excellent Park Slope Gallery Brooklyn.
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