I am currently working on a photo project about Co-op City. Co-op City is located in the northeast section of the Bronx, New York. It is a landmark for motorists entering New York City from the northeast – a mass of brick towers on the banks of the Hutchinson River. Designed by Herman J. Jessor, it is a very large quasi-cooperative/quasi-public middle income housing project. It consists of over 15,000 apartment units in 37 high-rise (24, 26, or 33 story) buildings. Co-op City was built on marshy land owned by "The Freedom Land Amusement Park" in the late 1960’s as a project encouraged by New York State’s Mitchell-Lama bill, designed to keep a middle class, and its tax revenues, in New York City, rather then fleeing to the suburbs.

I have been photographing in and around Co-op City for around four years. I document it in two different ways. I have been photographing the landscape. Co-op City from the outside. The beautiful marshy landscape and the buildings that compose this community. This work also includes portraits of the diverse people that inhabit Co-op City. Also I have began photographing the interiors of the apartments. Co-op City is composed of only a handful of difernt types of residential buildings. Of the high-rises (24, 26, or 33 story residential buildings) there are fifteen 33-storie high-rises. In these buildings there are a total of aproximentaly 1,980 of each of the three types of apartment each with identical floor plans. This means that there are 1,980 identical living rooms for instance. This is really exciting to me. The possibility of using one common thread, a sort of control in an experiment to illustrate peoples different ideas of an identical space. An empty room becomes a blank slate. I want to document as many different apartments as possible all in the same manner. Simple interior shots all from the same angle and position. Like the buildings themselves, my interior photographs have a rigid structure to them; the landscape photos outside the buildings do not.



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My resume....


For more info noah@thephotobooth.com or call Noah @ 718-963-2694