Taken in the "forgotten borough" of Staten Island between 1983 and 1984, the photographs in Christine Osinski’s (born 1948) Summer Days Staten Island create a portrait of working-class culture in an often overlooked section of New York City. Captured on Osinski’s large format 4x5 camera as she wandered the island, her candid portraits of strangers, vernacular architecture and quotidian scenes reveal an invisible landscape within reach of the thriving metropolis of Manhattan. The neighborhoods that Osinski captured are devoid of the skyscrapers, swarms of pedestrians and choking masses of traffic that are a short ferry ride away. Instead, she captures kids riding bikes on open, empty streets, suburban homes with neatly tended yards and the small-town feel of New York’s least populous borough. Accompanying the series of images is an essay by Paul Moakley, Time magazine’s Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.
"Two Girls with Big Wheels" is reproduced from Christine Osinski: Summer Days Staten Island.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New York Times
John Leland
Seen now, the photographs show the island’s game face, the one it turned to the outside world. Her subjects, whether children or adults, were home in their island redoubt, braced for whatever might come their way.
The Atlantic's CityLab
Jessica Leigh Hester
The photographs [preserve] calm, quiet summer days.
LENSCRATCH
Aline Smithson
Though the work is 35 years old, created in the 1980’s, it still feels fresh and interesting. Her black and white 4 x 5 capture of an often overlooked New York Borough shares intimate portraits focusing on a working class neighborhood that seemed very far away from the chaos of Manhattan.
Feature Shoot
Ellyn Kail
The people pictured here were strangers to the photographer, met only in passing. Still, in the pages of this book, they emerge as friends and neighbors, unnamed and unforgettable.
vogue.com
Rebecca Bengal
There’s a lightness in [Osinski's] Staten Island work... the kind of humor and understanding you find in the work of the great street photographer Helen Levitt.
Untapped Cities
Vera Penavic
Today, the world of social media has us morphing certain images of New York City to our liking, often covering up reality with filters... What separates Osinski’s book from this is not just the time period of the content, but her goal. It is a “fragmented journey,” an exploration of a new neighborhood she called home that developed into a project.
American Photo Magazine
Jack Crager
Osinski’s subjects radiate a nostalgic realism, a sense of unposed documentation.
American Suburb X
Brad Feuerhelm
There is a tight formalism within the pages depicting an America that has vanished.
Wall Street Journal
Angela Southern
Staten Island looks more like suburban New Jersey than it does any of New York’s other boroughs. When photographer Christine Osinski moved there from Manhattan in 1982 she explored her new home by taking random walks with her camera. The sympathetic pictures she took of the working-class tract developments, the people who lived in them, and their automobiles are shown in her Summer Days Staten Island...She has a sharp eye for details
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"Woman Cutting Grass" is reproduced from Summer Days Staten Island, a collection of Christine Osinski's photographs of the gloriously unself-conscious people and places of early-80s Staten Island. "Staten Island was a perfect place for me at the time. There was no one looking over my shoulder, nobody to impress, no galleries, no art museums, no hipsters, no deadlines. I was free to roam around with no particular place to go. I have always understood secondary sites, overlooked people and vernacular architecture, so Staten Island was a gold mine for me." Read more in The New York Times. continue to blog
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FORMAT: Hbk, 12 x 9.5 in. / 96 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $40.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $54 ISBN: 9788862084482 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 2/23/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Damiani. Text by Paul Moakley. Interview by A. H. Data.
Taken in the "forgotten borough" of Staten Island between 1983 and 1984, the photographs in Christine Osinski’s (born 1948) Summer Days Staten Island create a portrait of working-class culture in an often overlooked section of New York City. Captured on Osinski’s large format 4x5 camera as she wandered the island, her candid portraits of strangers, vernacular architecture and quotidian scenes reveal an invisible landscape within reach of the thriving metropolis of Manhattan. The neighborhoods that Osinski captured are devoid of the skyscrapers, swarms of pedestrians and choking masses of traffic that are a short ferry ride away. Instead, she captures kids riding bikes on open, empty streets, suburban homes with neatly tended yards and the small-town feel of New York’s least populous borough. Accompanying the series of images is an essay by Paul Moakley, Time magazine’s Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.
