Five years later, he awoke in the middle of the night and said, “Wait a second! What if there’s a party where everybody has names of three letters with that rhythm?” When they were introduced (“Ina, Uta”), everyone laughed. One evening, he was in a bar in the Village and bumped into a friend who’d just been to a party attended by actresses Ina Claire and Uta Hagen. Going by a friend’s tip, he landed a $120-a-week job at The New Yorker ‘s Talk of the Town section. He got a $26-a-month Alphabet City apartment, where it smelled like urine, and he started trying to be a serious novelist. the back has a shopping guide, broken up into sections by NYC neighborhood.Mr. it's young, old, rich, poor, all colors, all styles, all everything. the people pictured in the book are diverse: it's not all ridiculously rich, young, skinny people clothed in the latest designer threads or all coked-up hipsters. (damn i miss that place! good thing i'll be visiting in two weeks, starting nov. a portrait of the people of new york is a portrait of new york as a whole. the words add something to the photographs.they make the person more real, and their portrait that much more rich. i've said it about a million times before: clothing is more than just shaped pieces of fabric we use to cover our is a form of symbolism which defines who we are and how we want to be perceived by the world at large. why they wear what they wear, what their clothes say about who they are. the book has short interviews with the individuals, which give a deeper look into their style and their life on the whole. one could argue that the white backgrounds let the clothes (and the people wearing them) do the talking. the white backgrounds give the portraits a clean feel, undistracted by cluttered backgrounds (i like these sorts of street portraits both ways, actually (sometimes the background gives a mood, or sets the scene or says a lot about the individual)), but here it works, and it sets the new york magazine look book photos apart from the pack as a result. why? well, here's the theory i'm positing: I believe that this street fashion photo book is better than many i have seen. the internet is more than fine and dandy, but there's something temporary, ethereal, and changeable about it, just as it's nature, whereas a book is a tangible record. i've been checking in with said archives regularly the past couple of years, and i was delighted to see that they had been compiled into an actual, factual book. Tis an offshoot of new york magazine's look book street fashion feature, the archives of which can also be found right here. good old amazon most likely recommended it to me based upon my other purchases (isn't that nice? i'm always lurking around over there.i'm OBSESSED with books). Not sure how i came across this new tome, i pretty sure i stumbled across it on. New york look book: a gallery of street fashion by amy larocca & jake chessum:

New York Look Book by Amy Larocca