Laura Cameron’s latest book, 40 Ways of Looking at Manhattan, imagines where 40 random New Yorkers would send a visitor in search of the true Manhattan. The destinations include Soho and the West Village, midtown’s skyscrapers and riverfront vistas, and much more. It is a collaborative effort, partnering minimal text with dramatic black-and-white photographs taken by her husband, Timothy Sagosz.
A native New Yorker, she brought her own memories of the city to the portraits of 40 imagined Manhattanites. Each highly opinionated New Yorker directs the photographer to their favorite corner of the city. The resulting pictures take the reader from the Cloisters to the South Street Seaport and Jersey City.
Captioning Timothy Sagosz’s images took many hours of painstaking research, often figuratively riding the Google Maps time machine. The file names could be uninformative (SohoDoor-2013-113), and at times downright misleading. Two photographs titled “WestSide” actually turned out to be located off Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side.
An Abecedarium of Ornaments, her first book, was also produced by Art for Art’s Sake Press. The Abecedarium is a memoir in photographs, telling the stories of 200-plus ornaments from her family’s Christmas tree. (You can read more about it here.)
Like the ornaments that adorn her Christmas tree, she has spent many years in New York, her birthplace; England, where she lived for 16 years ; and the west coast of America. She counts St Albans, Monterey and Port Townsend among her all-time favorite places to live… and collect yet more intriguing ornaments.
