Photography Book Peter Funch: 42nd and Vanderbilt

Danish photographer, Peter Funch, placed these confines on his 9 year project, 42nd and Vanderbilt. Narrowing the infinite opportunities NYC has to offer an artist, Funch brings to the surface the minutiae contained within a fragment of our daily routine, the short walk from Point A to Point B, reminding us that the practice of photography in general, and street photography specifically, has only scratched the surface of possibility.
Through categorical editing equal parts intuitive and scientific, human patterning and mannerisms normally glossed over, become meditations on time, mortality, public and private space, the economy, and our inner selves. Funch employs a method that novelist Douglas Coupland aptly describes in the book’s afterword as “a kinder, gentler kind of surveillance.”
In one example, what appears to be a diptych of a woman, images taken only seconds apart, slowly becomes a “Spot the Difference” puzzle: subtle variations in attire, hair, light and shadow emerge as we realize, in both wonder and consternation, that the images were in fact taken days, months, or perhaps even years apart.
This simple and effective mechanism employed by Funch permeates the ordinary with the extraordinary. The fact that our own unknown tendencies, together with the rhythms and denizens of our surrounding ecosystem, can endure and replay over a path traveled thousands of times, becoming akin to performance, is nothing short of a revelation.

https://www.tbwbooks.com/products/42nd-and-vanderbilt