Julius Margan

I've been revisiting some of Joel Sternfeld's work recently following the release of a new edition of a book covering his work documenting the High Line in New York.

Some years ago I came across a few images from his series Oxbow Archive, a project that documented slow changes and seasonal variations within a field in Massachusetts. I kept them in mind over the years. The project took place in the mid-2000s when climate change started being heavily covered in the media. It also coincided with a period when documentaries started to become more mainstream, largely thanks to Michael Moore. There was Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and the same year also the saw the rise of YouTube. So it was an interesting time for photography and documentary making -- perhaps an optimistic time for thinking that photography had the power to bring about change.

Before that project though, in 2000 he began to photograph the abandoned railroad track known as the High Line that ran through a section of Manhattan. The project contained many similarities to Oxbow Archive: a documentation span of about one year, subtle changes in mood and colour, and a concentration of interest in a small area of land. The photos described an area that had been largely reclaimed by nature, untended in the twenty year period since the last train delivered its goods. Wildflowers and grasses had grown up through the tracks -- even fruit trees had begun to flourish there; it had essentially become a meadow. Wild nature existed only 25 feet above busy city streets.

In 1999, a non-profit organisation, Friends of the High Line, was set up to try to help preserve the area with the idea of developing it into park land. The land was valuable; Mayor Giuliani saw it as unsightly, and it was in serious danger of being demolished. Sternfeld's photos were widely seen and used at public meetings where they became a point of reference for what could be done with the land, and more importantly, what would be lost should it be torn down. It was touch and go for quite a few years. On one side, there was a push to demolish and redevelop it. On the other, the newly elected Mayor Bloomberg was an advocate for its preservation. In the end the public and the administration gave its support – the general feeling was that it would be positive for the city. The redesign was done beautifully and I suspect that Sternfeld's photos were an inspiration on the landscape design -- some of the tracks were preserved and grasses were planted to reflect its history as a meadow.

Several other artists contributed to the project. Sarah Sze's grid-like work references the constructed path and the buildings surrounding it and incorporates smaller box-like elements housing birds and insects, which in turn, incorporate themselves into the artwork by extension. Ed Rusha's mural is pretty funny – it's painted hot pink and has a rather droll message which I image would contrast effectively with the lush green, peaceful nature of the surroundings.

A book was published in 2001 from the series, with an updated edition arriving in 2012 – the edition that I saw. The first thing I noticed was that it was smaller than I thought it would be. There's a tradition to making books from large format photography to be oversized (a notable exception – Joel Meyerowitz's “At the Water's Edge”, a tiny collection). Being published by Steidl, it's of a very high quality, but it's not ostentatious at all. The volume is fairly slim, with the final section devoted to essays and a time-line of the history of the line along with a few images such as photos from the early days. As it's titled, the book invites the viewer to imagine walking the length of it, approximately 2.33 km -- sometimes the viewpoint changes only slightly, on occasion only by a few meters. There are pictures with snow and fog, but the overall feeling and colour palette is one of autumnal moodiness; hard sunlight seldom if ever appears. The intense greenery is one of the first things you notice, everything else seems to fade towards desaturated monochrome. Upon closer inspection small items appear in the grasses – a bottle, detritus, a tiny lit-up Christmas tree. The meadow seems to develop its own sense of order. Small dense patches of wildflowers seamlessly merge into thicker areas of wild vegetation. In one image, snow carpets almost all forms of life, with just a few twigs and branches poking out from underneath the blanket. Above all it is solitary. Seen by very few, it was shut-off from any form of legal public access -- Sternfeld was granted special permission to photograph it by the line's owners.

It's rare to find urban planning done much creative originality; this was an exception that brought the right people together at the right time.