Summer Days Staten Island

(Hardback)

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Taken in the "forgotten borough" of Staten Island between 1983 and 1984, the photographs in Christine Osinski's (born 1948) 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.

Reviews

Staten Island looks more like suburban New Jersey than it does any of New York's other boroughs. When photographer Christine Osinski moved there from Manhattan in 1982 she explored her new home by taking random walks with her camera. The sympathetic pictures she took of the working-class tract developments, the people who lived in them, and their automobiles are shown in her Summer Days Staten Island...She has a sharp eye for details--Angela Southern "Wall Street Journal"