Christopher Wool – East Broadway Breakdown
Author: Christopher Wool
Title: East Broadway Breakdown
Publisher: Holzwarth Publications, Berlin
Year: 2003 (first edition)
4to, softcover, photographically illustrated dust jacket, 328 pages, including 158 black-and-white photographs. Photos and book concept by Christopher Wool, book design by Hans Werner Holzwarth.
All the photos are taken at night in Wools’ neighborhood, the lower east side. In contrast with a formal and careful photographic approach, this body of work seems more an anti-fine art photography manifesto, focusing on uninteresting details along the streets, captured casually and in a rough photographic style. The lack of any human presence, the urban nighttime environment, the bleak lighting, and the lack of esthetic rigueur, are all elements expressing a gloomy feeling. As if the subjects photographed were secondary, unimportant, compared with the photographer’s state of mind.
