Photographer Jennifer Kotter shows that architectural beauty
is in the eye of the beholder, of light, shadow and…

DETAILS, DETAILS

By Carl Glassman
MAY 4, 2006

If you walked by this building you wouldn't even notice the pillar," says Jennifer Kotter as she pointed to a picture of, yes, a pillar, but in its interplay of shadows and shapes, much more than that. "It's part of one of those trashy blue jeans stores, but here it is isolated from all the loud, crazy signs and busy, noisy, visual stuff."

"I had to find it," she adds with a smile, "but there it was."

Such serene and simple architectural tableaus, discovered amid the visual tumult of the city, are the focus of a photographic project that Kotter began in 2002.

A longtime resident of Duane Street with a studio at Hudson and Franklin Streets, Kotter was out of town on Sept. 11, 2001, and when she returned three weeks later she found herself disoriented by the loss of familiar landmarks that had been destroyed or were hidden behind barricades.

"The whole idea of documenting these things didn't occur to me until after that," she says. "So I think this project is about a kind of memory. You want to have proof."

Kotter says her most successful photos are those she calls "transformative"—moving beyond recognizable forms into the realm of abstraction. The eye is transfixed, not by a building's bolk and style but by the artful framing and chiaroscuro presentation of its fine, sometimes mysterious details.

Recognizable or not, the images seem to honor the architectural flourishes and lost craftsmanship of the past. In fact, Kotter refuses to photograph buildings constructed after 1939.

The northern boundary of her project is 14th Street and many of the photographs, like those shown here, portray bits of the solid, 19th-century industrial buildings of her own Tribeca and Lower Manhattan neighborhoods.
One of her favorites is the image of a pillar at 110 Hudson Street, directly across the street from her studio. The building hadn't interested her until the sun glanced onto it, just to her liking.

"I stare at it every day and I had never seen this configuration of shadows before," she beams. "I went home and got my camera and when I came back it hadn't disappeared yet. This was really lucky."

Kotter, who was a photojournalist for the Village Voice for 10 years and now does a variety of photography assignments, moved to Tribeca in 1982. Right away, she was taken by the architecture.

"I was paying attention to more long shots and how the sky was cut out in certain geometric ways, the way that shadows and texture fell. But I wasn't concentrating on this small stuff at all."

Kotter seems never to tire of exploring the infinite possibilities of light and shadow. She sees her project, called "Details Below 14th Street," expanding into the South Street Seaport, the courthouses of the Civic Center, and Wall Street.
Her pictures of Soho and Tribeca, she notes, may just be "Volume One."

"It's good news that this looks like an endless project right now," says the photographer. "I can just keep looking and looking."