Big New York

teNeues has form with the format: oversized city books produced to collector standards, built around a group of photographers rather than a text essay. Big New York follows this approach. Fourteen photographers contributed work, and their approaches are genuinely different from each other. Elliott Erwitt's black and white images are from the mid-twentieth century; Thomas Hoepker's street photography carries a German photojournalist's eye for the telling moment; Christophe Jacrot works almost exclusively in rain and low light, producing scenes of the city that most New York books avoid. Phil Penman and Misha Erwitt (Elliott's son) represent more recent street work; Alan Schaller brings a high-contrast London sensibility to Manhattan's geometry; Serge Ramelli shoots long exposures and lit cityscapes. The remaining seven contributors fill out the span.

The result covers roughly seven decades of the city without being organised chronologically. Each photographer gets their own chapter with a short biography, so the visual differences are contextualised rather than left as a series of unmarked tonal shifts. The dual English and German text reflects teNeues's German publishing origins.

The object has been made to hold attention: 370×290mm, 512 pages, colour-edged pages, an embossed cover, and a slipcase with a cut-out window. At 1,822g, it is not a book you read in an armchair. The colour-edge technique echoes the fore-edge painting tradition of old library bindings, though here it reads more as graphic design.

The 14-photographer model is the same approach teNeues used in its Big Los Angeles and Big Paris volumes. Readers familiar with those will know what they are getting. Those new to this series will find it a broader introduction to New York's photographic history than most single-subject options manage.