Landscape as Longing: Queens, New YorkIn 2003, Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld were commissioned to photograph one of the densest concentrations of ethnic diversity in the world, the borough of Queens in New York City. After more than a year of photographing everything from corner bodegas to the boroughs boundaries, Gohlke and Sternfeld had not only captured the complicated dynamic that sustains Queens and its myriad communities; they had also evolved a unique theory of landscape

The Moth derives from one black-and-white picture that Jem Southam made in about 1983: a solitary man standing on Gwithian beach in St Ives

and expands to include additional images he marked on contact sheets as well as further selections from his archive which he likely never even reviewed

Going through these negatives again I found new images that I now liked

yet nobody appears to care about their predicament

Each story stands on its own page among its companion images

other than simultaneously on the outskirts of everything and in the thick of a perpetual and sublime (and very quiet) mystery

In 2001 I met Grazia Neri and joined her agency

drawing deeply on her formative years in Providence

quotations of other writers’ work that inspire the artist

The project’s origins lie in the Prison University Project

and photography is particularly well suited to capture and amplify the swirling fluidity and the wonderfully serendipitous moments born of the ephemeral

The book also includes an introductory text by Kai Carlson-Wee and an original poem by Guggenheim-award winning writer Janice Harrington