Taken in the "forgotten borough" of Staten Island between 1983 and 1984, the photographs in Christine Osinski's Summer Days Staten Island create a portrait of working-class culture in an often overlooked section of New York City.
Captured on Osinski's large format 4x5 camera as she wandered the island, her candid portraits of strangers, vernacular architecture and quotidian scenes reveal an invisible landscape within reach of the thriving metropolis of Manhattan. The neighborhoods that Osinski captured are devoid of the skyscrapers, swarms of pedestrians and choking masses of traffic that are a short ferry ride away. Instead, she captures kids riding bikes on open, empty streets, suburban homes with neatly tended yards and the small-town feel of New York's least populous borough. Accompanying the series of images is an essay by Paul Moakley, Time magazine's Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.
Christine Osinski (born 1948 in Chicago) is an American photographer. Photographs and reviews of her work have appeared in Aperture; The New York Times; The New Yorker; The New York Times Sunday Magazine; BBC News; vogue.com; The Guardian; The Telegraph; Photograph Magazine; The Wall Street Journal; Boston Globe; Time Light Box; and in numerous other books and periodicals. Osinski's work may be found in many collections including: MOMA in New York City; Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; Museum of the City of New York; Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Bibliotheque National in Paris; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; Berkeley Art Museum in California and the New York Public Library among other collections.
