Just before the pandemic hit, I was working on a project about the High Line and its surrounding urban landscape in Manhattan. Not wanting to take the subway during the spring of 2020, I began shooting my neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. When the George Floyd demonstrations broke out, I made a couple of trips south to Richmond to witness the last days of the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. And I did a quick trip to Philadelphia to document the neighborhood around Four Seasons Landscaping, the weird and wacky location of a Rudy Giuliani press conference that symbolically ended the Trump presidency.

Now, I’m back riding the subway, have a new camera, this Fujifilm medium format beast, and have decided to pick up where I left off photographing the High Line. The High Line, as is well-known, is a rail viaduct running along the west side of Manhattan. It stood abandoned for years after shipping moved to containers and the more spacious wetlands of New Jersey. Joel Sternfeld made stunning view camera images of the High Line, which helped spur the repurposing of the viaduct as a pedestrian promenade.

Whether you like it or hate it, it is an amazing urban presence passing through a landscape of old industrial structures now interspersed with a panoply of modern architectural styles.

The weeds and wildflowers grew in the thin layer of accumulated dirt between the tracks – even a few small trees sprouted up. Joel Sternfeld’s images eloquently revealed the tenacity of nature in an inhospitable environment. The landscape designers charged with transforming the rail viaduct into a pedestrian pathway sought to evoke the nascent wilderness of the abandoned high line. From certain angles, like in my picture above, the paved walkway disappears and visitors appear to be wading through a meadow of wildflowers, albeit constrained by the dense urban landscape of Manhattan.