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Store Front II: A History Preserved: The Disappearing Face of New York
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About Store Front II: A History Preserved: The
Product Description James and Karla Murray have been capturing impeccably accurate photographs of New York City since the 1990s. In the course of their travels throughout the city's boroughs they've also taken great care to document the stories behind the scenery. The Murrays have rendered the out of the way bodegas, candy shops and record stores just as faithfully as the historically important institutions and well known restaurants, bars and cafes. From the Stonewall Inn to the Brownsville Bike Shop and The Pink Pussycat to Smith and Wolensky, the Murrays reveal how New York's beleaguered mom & pop business stand in sharp contrast to the city's rapidly evolving corporate facade. The authors' landmark 2008 book, Store Front, was recently cited in Bookforum's 20th Anniversary issue as having "demonstrated the paradoxical power of digital photo editing to alter actual views in order for us to see more clearly what is really there." James and Karla Murray live in New York City and were awarded the New York Society Library's prestigious New York City book award in 2012 for their last book, New York Nights. Review "Mom and Pop shops--small, family-run businesses--are dying off in New York City at an alarming rate. They are being squeezed out by gentrification, skyrocketing rents, and competition by big impersonal chains. And so far Mayor Bill de Blasio seems disinclined to do anything about it. That's why James and Karla Murray's new coffee table-sized book, Store Front II: A History Preserved, is so crucial. Like anthropologists rushing to document an isolated Amazonian tribe before civilization encroaches, the Murrays are racing to record Mom and Pop shops before the wrecking ball arrives.The Murrays' first volume, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, was published in 2000; a depressing two-thirds of its subjects no longer exist. Store Front II just came out this year, but already an alarming one-fifth of its contents have closed.If you are a longtime New Yorker, the experience of reading Store Front II is like perusing the most beautiful old family photography album in the world. On every other page are beloved but deceased relatives." - Huffington Post "In 2008, photographers James and Karla Murray published Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York . That book garnered much praise, both as art and as documentation of endangered mom-and-pop businesses in New York. Adding poignancy to the images are many examples of the disappearances of such shops in recent years, victims of rising commercial rents, gentrification, and corporate retail encroachment. The threat is real: almost two-thirds of the businesses photographed in the Murrays' first book have vanished in the short time since its publication. They continue their project with this follow-up effort, covering all five of New York's boroughs (Manhattan and Brooklyn receive the most attention). The subtitle of this new volume speaks to their desire to preserve the businesses, if only in photos. Troubling urban politics aside, the images are beautiful and so precise (the oversized format helps, too) that readers will get lost in them, savoring the weathered facades; hand-lettered signs; neon; awnings; and crowded window displays. VERDICT Fans of fine photography, and those concerned about urban issues will find much to absorb here." - The Library Journal "Back in the late 90s, the photographers James and Karla Murray settled on a project: to catalogue New York's most compelling storefronts with a 35mm camera. What began as a personal mission became an epic five-borough endeavour - and a race against time. Murrays' new book Store Front II: A History Preserved, the Disappearing Face of New York is the concluding part of a trilogy. It's their second "daytime" book; the first was published in 2009 - withNew York Nights (2012), chronicling Big Apple facades after dark, sandwiched in between. Another volume is unlikely, given the commercial quicksands un
