INTERBOROUGH New York is a photographic narrative in the form of a documentary archive. As a study, it is about the civic architecture and landscape of the city found in places where Manhattan connects with the outer boroughs through its infrastructure. As a story, it is an account of the neighborhoods in these districts where acknowledgments to the past are combined with visions of the present through pictures. As an experience, it is a journey through streets, over rails and across waterways, in pursuit of the physical and psychological meanings of the city as can be found in its buildings and structures. INTERBOROUGH New York is a fictional artwork based in fact.
The narrative begins in northern Manhattan where the uptown heights and the hills of west Bronx coexist with the Harlem River running in between. From there the story continues west to east across the Harlem plane and the Triborough islands to Long Island City in Queens. As the movement crisscrosses the other way from east to west, Brooklyn connects with the East River and the Lower East Side. From there the journey continues across the Hudson River to Jersey City, thus expanding the footprint of metropolitan New York. The narrative concludes at the southern tip of Manhattan where the downtown enclosures open up to the harbor and the Staten Island Ferry.
The photographs are arranged into four sections with multiple chapters for each dating from 1997 to 2014 with one exception from 1991. The subjects include: (1) Infrastructure - bridges, highways, rails, depots, stations, and terminals. (2) Landscape - parks, cemeteries, memorials, and waterways. (3) Buildings and Structures - schools, hospitals, armories, monuments, prisons, utilities, factories, theaters, museums, libraries, ornaments and signs, government buildings, subsidized housing, and houses of worship.
As an historical document, INTERBOROUGH New York is a resource and a record of architectural transition during the first decade of the new millennium.
Stephen A Scheer was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. He received a B.A. in Art History from Bowdoin College in 1976 and an M.F.A. in Photography from Yale University in 1980. Scheer received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 to complete his first important work in color photography about an isolated river community in Connecticut called The Maples (Aperture #91, 1983 and reissued by Blue Sky Books, 2016). His work was included twice in the series on New Color Photography, by Sally Eauclaire (Abbeville Press, 1984 and 1987). In 1989, Scheer was commissioned by the City of New York to photograph the gardens of Wave Hill in the Bronx for the book, Wave Hill Pictured: Celebration of a Garden, by Jean E. Feinberg (Harry N. Abrams, 1991). For this project he used a unique method of in-camera multiple exposure photography with electronic flash, natural light, and color.
In 1992, Scheer was appointed the Chair of Photography at the University of Georgia. From 1997 to 2004, he received research grants from the university to resume his work in New York. In 2001, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to photograph architectural subjects in New York City. Scheer is currently Professor of Art in Photography at UGA.
Scheer’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe and Japan. In 1991, he was shown in the series New Photography 7, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has been collected or shown by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Equitable Society of the United States, Reader’s Digest, and the Coca-Cola Company among others. His work has been featured and reviewed in Aperture, DoubleTake, Time/Life Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Fortune, Esquire, People Magazine, Mother Jones Magazine, Popular Photography, and American Photographer.
Stephen A Scheer lives and works in New York City and Athens, Georgia.