Boing Boing noted today (via Kottke.org) designer Richard Howe’s photographic documentation of every street corner in Manhattan, “The Manhattan Street Corners.” (Howe’s site was temporarily unavailable with an exceeded bandwidth limit when I tried checking it out.)
It reminds me of Caleb Smith’s resolution (which, like Howe’s project, took two years) to walk every street in Manhattan.
It also reminds me of conceptual artist/photographer Dylan Stone’s plan to photograph not only Manhattan's street corners but the four sides of every block, for a series he named “Drugstore Photographs, Or, A Trip Along the Yangtze River.”
For comparative purposes, Howe took 11,000 photos covering every corner in Manhattan. Stone, who reckoned he’d need “between one and three rolls of film” per block to accomplish his feat, had taken 26,000 snapshots by the year 2000—and he never finished the project, having covered only the blocks below Canal Street.
“My project, at heart, is about conservation,” Stone wrote. “It is a living, precious photographic archive of an entire city.” And this statement gained resonance after 9/11, as part of his mundane city record included photos of the World Trade Center.