South Street

Barbara G. Mensch

April, 2007
Cloth, 192 pages, 133 Photographs
ISBN: 978-0-231-13932-8
$29.95 / £19.95

Though not officially part of the port of New York, the Fulton Fish Market was very much its creature and danced to its tune: at the port's zenith, the fish market was riding high; when corrupt unions took over the docks, the rackets similarly fed on the fish market; just as the port resisted industrialization and cleaved to its old-fashioned, human-chain means of loading cargo, the fish market clung to ice barrels and grappling hooks. Part of the market's lore was that if a fishmonger looked like a bum, grizzled, tattered, without a dollar, you could trust that his credit was good, whereas "if he's all dolled up, stay away from him." This curious inversion of appearances fit with the general topsy-turvy ethos of the fish market, where trickery and guile were encouraged, yet everything operated on a system of trust.

Because Barbara Mensch is such a powerful, gifted photographer, many of her single images are knockouts. Cumulatively, this work is magnificent—an anthropological trove, an aesthetic vision of the highest order, one of the great modern sequences of the life of a community. Even the sites that are emptied of human figures throb with a drama of resistance and displacement. Above all, these pictures convey resilience and continuity, even in the face of eradication. What other choice is there? the men seem to say.

Related Subjects

• New York City
• Photography
• Urban History

About the Author

Barbara G. Mensch is a New York artist who has exhibited in the United States and Europe, at venues including The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; The Municipal Art Society of New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Lowe Gallery; The Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City; and Photokina in Cologne, Germany. Her work has been published in Natural History, Inc., Metropolis, and The New York Times, among many other periodicals, and she has contributed to a number of books, including Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images. Some collections including her work are The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Museum of the City of New York. She is represented by the Bonni Benrubi Gallery, Inc. New York. Phillip Lopate currently holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, where he is professor of English, and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. A writer of fiction, poetry, and film and architectural criticism, he is the author of numerous books, including Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan and Portrait of My Body, which was a finalist for PEN best essay book of the year.

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