Manhattan Project

A decade-long photographic exploration of Manhattan's West Side. Jan Staller captures the city’s architectural rebirth, elevating ordinary building materials into extraordinary compositions. A celebration of urban beauty, light, form, and texture. Text in English and French.

Manhattan Project is a collection of photographs that capture the evolving landscape of Manhattan's West Side over the past decade. Exploiting the revelatory power of photography, these images explore a city’s architectural transformation.

While Jan Staller's earlier work focused on industrial decay, these new photographs explore the rise of high-rise construction. By isolating and zooming in on building materials, Staller elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. The resulting images, reminiscent of drawings or abstract paintings, reveal the hidden beauty and formal qualities of these often-overlooked elements.

This project reimagines the city not as a monolithic entity, but as a composition of intricate details. It celebrates the interplay of light, form and texture, inviting viewers to rethink the familiar and discover the artistic potential of the urban environment.

Text in English and French.

Jan Staller's photographs span a period of over 40 years and have been exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the High Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other public and private institutions. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Corporation. He has published two monographs: Frontier New York (Hudson Hills Press) and On Planet Earth (Aperture). Staller has also worked on assignment for many magazines, including Time and Life Magazine, Fortune, Forbes Magazine, Wired, Discover, Conde Nast Traveler, The New York Times and others.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a renowned astrophysicist, was born in New York City and developed a lifelong passion for astronomy as a child. He studied at both Harvard and Columbia University, and later became the youngest director of the Hayden Planetarium. His research interests include star formation, exploding stars and the structure of the Milky Way. Known for his ability to make complex scientific concepts accessible, Tyson has authored numerous books and hosted popular television shows such as NOVA ScienceNow. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and has had an asteroid named after him.

Brett Littman, a New Yorker, is Senior Director of Carpenters Workshop Gallery and formerly Director of the Isamu Noguchi Museum (2018-2023). Over the last 16 years, he has overseen and organized over 180 exhibitions, covering visual art, outsider art, crafts, architecture, music, science, and literature; notably, Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center (2019-2020). He is also an art critic, lecturer and essayist, in addition to writing articles for an array of magazines.