Goings On About Town: Photographs for the New Yorker by Sylvia PlachyAperture/The New Yorker, 2007

This book of photographs, with a foreword by Mark Singer and an afterword by Elisabeth Biondi, consists of eighty pictures that were taken while Plachy was the photographer for The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, plus one that wasn’t. The pictures are a mix of color and black & white, and are mostly from 2005 and 2006 (the book came out in 2007). As Singer notes in the foreword, nearly all the pictures contain at least one living creature, though some of my favorites are ones that don’t. I love “A table at the filming of Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe,” which is a black and white image that reminds me of the work of Plachy’s friend and mentor André Kertész , in the elegance of its shading and line and composition: it’s a picture of a salt shaker and a pepper shaker, a creamer, and bowl of sugar on a table, with a painted wall as backdrop, and it’s entirely lovely, much more graceful that that description of it might make you think. Another person-less picture I love is “Macy’s warehouse, before the Thanksgiving Day Parade,” in which there are four models hanging from the ceiling: a painted model of Kermit the Frog in vivid green, his arm raised in a wave, another model that’s identical but unpainted, and two more unpainted models of other characters: it’s wry and charming, a great behind-the-scenes moment. Elsewhere, Plachy captures people in the act of making art: there’s a great photo of two people working on “Sol LeWitt’s rooftop installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” I love the bright waves of the LeWitt piece, and the glimpse of its making: the blur of someone in motion on a ladder; another woman with a paintbrush or marker in her hand and a roll of masking tape around each wrist. When Plachy isn’t taking behind-the-scenes pictures, she often captures the audience/viewers of some place or event: the photo of an auto show includes a pair of kids looking at an SUV; the picture of a tiger at the Bronx Zoo is also a picture of a pair of kids looking at the tiger. At the Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden, Plachy photographs not so much the orchids as a girl posing in front of them, her tongue sticking out as a woman (her mother?) takes her picture. The pictures in this book I like best are, generally, formally interesting/satisfying: in “A wigmaker at the Metropolitan Opera,” a woman in a pale pink cardigan sits at a table with wig forms and potted plants behind her, with the leaves of a plant and tendrils of a wig trailing into the frame from above: it’s wonderful. In “A post-performance talk by dancers at Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, Massachusetts,” we see the dancers’ feet and legs,mostly, as they sit in a line on a stage: we don’t see their faces at all, or the audience; much of the frame is taken up by greenery in front of the stage.