P4M BOOK REVIEW: 1000 ON 42ND STREET, PHOTOGRAPHS BY NEIL SELKIRK (POWERHOUSE BOOKS)

For a look at the authentic face of New York that will restore your faith in humanity, check out 1000 on 42nd Street, a new book of photo portraits by Neil Selkirk. The book consists of page after page of color head shots of ordinary people (plus a few famous ones), taken outdoors, during the day, against a white backdrop at the entrance of an old Times Square theater during the summer of 1997, just as plans were being completed for the renovation of the neighborhood by the 42nd Street Development Project, which sponsored Selkirk. The people were anyone who happened to walk by. They signed a release and wrote down where they were from and what they were doing there. Their portraits were then made into posters and hung in groups on fences surrounding the many construction sites that then filled the area.

The project was popular-- and it did a lot to popularize the Development Project itself: big-bad, naughty-bawdy 42nd Street humanized, for everyone again! The people in the pictures are smiling or not; they're posing or not; their hair, make-up, jewelry, clothing, headgear, and/or dental work are either interesting from a style point of view or not; they either seem to get a sense of historical specialness about the moment or not. Which was all part of the point, as envisioned by the philosopher-slash-art director who dreamed up the project, Tibor Kalman. Recently claimed by cancer while enjoying acclaim during middle age, Kalman served as the 42nd Street Development Project's "architectural and cultural guru" and had a way, in all his work, of making strong yet simple graphic and design statements that revealed vigorously de-cliched views of humanity. (Kalman was the creative director of the magazine Benetton used to put out, Colors.)

1000 on 42nd Street presents 300 full-size Selkirk portraits, plus, reproduced on the book's fold-out covers, hundreds more in miniature. Looking at the book one page at a time is like staring at one of those abstract pictures that's supposed to suddenly snap into three-dimensionality. You're looking, you're looking, then BANG!, you see something totally unexpected. And that is what warmly smirky Alexandra ("going to a meeting") and slyly reticent Doctor Dre ("making hits!") have in common. It's what unites sadly tearful Reggie, a guy from Brooklyn ("just walkin around"), and annoyingly self-promoting Nikki, the vitamin-peddling ex-celebutante from East 68th Street ("going to a GNC to buy Star Caps"). It's what obviously outgoing Raul from Astoria ("passing through") shares with uncharacteristically diffident New York Post columnist Cindy from Fifth Avenue ("because she loves the city"). And it's why tender little Julia ("trying to scalp tickets to The Lion King") and tough-looking Lester ("I don't know"), by the sheer fact of both having been photographed by Selkirk in the summer of 1997, enjoy only one degree of separation: the need to be part of the action, civilization's rawest material.