Every day, as I climb the stoop of a beautiful old Brooklyn brownstone, open the door, and enter my sublet apartment, I come across an impressive map of Manhattan Island from the eighteenth century (Figure 1). Part of my everyday landscape in New York City, this map serves a purpose: it reminds me of the backstory of the made lands, intricately interwoven with water, wetlands, and marshlands—features that are no longer easily recognizable in the city today, at least in Manhattan. When I first...

Image 1. The Shed. Photograph by Bas van Heur, 2025. Photos are selective: they frame complex realities by foregrounding certain aspects while backgrounding others, which raises questions about photography’s capacity to capture urban phenomena in a holistic manner. During my fieldwork in New York–part of a longer sabbatical investigating how philanthropic and public funding shapes arts organizations globally–I found myself repeatedly drawn to photographs of arts organization buildings,...

Figure 1. Queens Public Library card. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025. “We speak your language,” the slogan of the Queens Public Library, captures Queens as a meeting point of countless cultures, histories, and ways of keeping time. Walking along Roosevelt Avenue, I began to see how multiethnic commercial streets reveal the borough’s dense linguistic and spatial complexity. In Jackson Heights, every corner, passageway, and basement façade becomes a site where immigrant-run small businesses...