Drawing on a series of photographs made between 2019 and 2020 in the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street train station in Queens, New York, Roosevelt Station proves at once mundane and almost ethereal in its tenor. Here, New York photographer David Rothenberg captures his subjects – commuters, airport-bound travellers, panhandlers, missionaries and others – awash in the radiant, cathedral-like light of the station's concourse, these otherwise candid, rush-hour images assuming an otherworldly theatrical guise.

In the book's essay, curator and writer David Campany describes the act of photographing such a building as Roosevelt Station – its unique quality of light deriving from artist Tom Patti's 2004 glass installation Night Passage, which is integrated into the windows of the station's main glass wall – as broaching both 'reportage and theatre'. 'The social spaces of advanced capitalism are vast and complex', writes Campany.

While referencing Walker Evans' subway portraits among other historical examples, Rothenberg's hyper-observant photographs take the archetype somewhere unmistakably new. In a cultural moment struck by crisis and division, these images feel like a kind of unifying treatise. No matter who they are, where they've been and where they're going, these commuters walk the same concourses and climb the same steps – each illuminated by a celestial glow.

David Rothenberg is a photographer and educator based in New York. His photographs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York and numerous library special collections including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Rothenberg received an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Parsons School of Design.