The South Bronx, 1980, 35mm slide, © Brian Rose

I’ve been up to the Bronx a number of times in the past year shooting some new buildings for an architecture client. For anyone old enough to remember the devastation of the 1980s, the rebuilding that has taken place in the South Bronx in recent years is amazing, and heartwarming. While doing my Lower East Side project in 1980, which also dealt with urban desolation, I made my way up to the South Bronx a few times. The image above, scanned from a 35mm Kodachrome, is from one of those trips.

The South Bronx, Ray Mortenson

There is currently a show at the Museum of the City of New York that provides a vivid look back at the Bronx of that time–Broken Glass, photographs by Ray Mortenson. Mortenson photographed the abandoned buildings of the area with a dogged comprehensiveness. His work, evoking Bernd and Hilla Becher’s building typologies, is suspended somewhere between documentary and art. But unlike the Bechers who approached their subjects with absolute consistency, even to the point of shooting only on cloudy days, Mortenson’s photographs are less rigorously composed, done with a smaller camera, and are the result of more haphazard wanderings through the streets and cadaverous tenements of the Bronx.

The South Bronx, Ray Mortenson

It’s hard to tell from the pictures themselves what Mortenson’s motivation was exactly besides a wide-eyed astonishment gazing on such a desolate landscape of failure and ruin. They offer no explanation, no political engagement, no connection to the fragments of community that remained in the Bronx through the worst years. But that detachment makes them stronger historical documents–evidence rather than commentary.

The South Bronx, Ray Mortenson

That said, however, I can see Mortenson schlepping day after day through the streets with his camera, tip toeing gingerly through the rubble not knowing who or what lurks around the corner or in the next darkened room. That personal sense of mission, of passion–or whatever it was–comes through in these otherwise cooly realized images of destruction.

More images from Broken Glass.