Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan

Outer Boroughs: New York beyond Manhattan continues the tradition — actually the several traditions — of photography in New York City. The predecessors of William Meyers worked almost entirely in Manhattan, but he worked in the other four boroughs — Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Most of his pictures were taken on anonymous streets where the people of the place live and go about their business; they represent the quotidian, not the spectacular; they are the outer boroughs of the spirit as well as of the physical city. The work is not concerned with documentation, the way things look, but with “thusness” — the feel of a place at a particular moment. Each image represents a certain time in a certain part of a certain city where, he has found, even in unlikely neighborhoods there are occasions for beauty. The Outer Boroughs project is completed. In 2008, the New York Public Library purchased a portfolio of 86 prints for its permanent collection. Other prints are in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society.