Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present Drugstore Photographs
or a Trip Along the Yangtze River by Dylan Stone.
Dylan Stone's ongoing project, to photograph every block on the island
of Manhattan with an automatic point-and-shoot camera, will be on
view at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery during the month of June. Stone
began with the block near Peter Minuit Plaza in the Financial District in
1999 and will continue until he reaches Inwood, adding new photos to
his archive throughout the exhibition.
Stone has numbered each block on the official county map, totaling
roughly 2,500 blocks and including any triangular spaces or less
populated areas which may have been converted into parking lots or be
under train tracks. Using between one and three rolls of film per block,
Stone photographs the blocks in numerical order. The film is
processed at a local drugstore and returned in envelopes which Stone
codes according to the numbered map, organized in the order that the
blocks were walked. The catalogued photographs are then stored in
museum-quality storage systems.
Stone's process simultaneously arrests time, capturing the state of the
island at a particular moment, and traces its insistent flow, South to
North, along the island's length. When his archive is complete, a
significant passage of time will exist between the first photos of the
Financial District and those of Inwood, the final area in which Stone's
numbered blocks of Manhattan end. Similar to Richard Long's
documentation of his walks through varied landscapes, Stone maps his
own movement through a continually changing urban landscape.
"My project, at heart is about conservation. It is a living, precious
photographic archive of an entire city. Yet it contains cheaply
processed photographs from a typical, nondescript Manhattan
drugstore. It documents the dubious decisions of what corporate and
political officials choose to conserve, or--more likely--rebuild. To some,
it seems, conservation itself may be a lost idea." -Dylan Stone
Dylan Stone's work was most recently included in "Greater New York"
at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. He lives and works in New York.
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery 526 West 26 St., New York NY 10001
For more information, please call the gallery at 212.243.3335.