“For New Yorkers, 1975 was a particularly bleak year of a tumultuous decade. The city was on the verge of insolvency, mired in a national recession and reeling from the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. Twenty percent of the public workforce was laid off while rates of crime and drug use soared. In these relentlessly frontal, clear-eyed pictures, indications of a grim reality are everywhere to be found in the form of sordid surfaces, improvised signage, cracked windows, and dissident scrawls.

When the photographs in this book were first exhibited in 1976, their formal austerity and apparently neutral stance invited comparison with the contemporaneous work of Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and other photographers featured in the seminal 'New Topographics' exhibition. Distance, however, has revealed their concerns and temperament to be more akin to those of Marville or Atget, both of whom had a special feeling for the life and death of buildings (and thus of place), or Walker Evans, whose pictures Lincoln Kirstein praised for their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur.’” — From the Introduction by Joshua Chuang