Jan Staller, Constructor of Image
“I photograph construction sites,” Jan Staller says to security guards when they try to shoo him away. He doesn’t like to be told no, but some version of no is usually what he gets. So he shoots from outside the fence. In recent years, he has focussed on material held aloft by cranes. In isolation, against a white background that is actually overcast sky, a hook or a caisson or a sheaf of rebar appears sculptural, abstract, exquisite.
Since last spring, on gray days, Staller has been prowling the perimeter of the Gateway tunnel site, by the West Side rail yards, with his giant telephoto lens, like a birder who has lost his way. A clamshell bucket is his snowy owl.
The Gateway project includes a pair of new passenger-train tunnels under the Hudson River, and also the rehabilitation of the existing tubes, which are more than a hundred years old and were damaged during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012. A want of money and a surplus of political petulance have thwarted versions of this undertaking for three decades. Under President Joe Biden, federal funding finally became available, the lion’s share in 2024, only for President Donald Trump to threaten to withdraw it a year later. The funding stopped during the government shutdown last fall, and the Trump Administration refused to restore it. Trump reportedly told Senator Charles Schumer that he’d free up the funds only if Penn Station and Dulles Airport were renamed for him. A month ago, work on the Gateway project stopped. No money, no tunnel. Around a thousand union laborers were laid off.
A few days before the cease-work order, Staller, who is seventy-three, was in his studio getting ready for an outing to the site. “I find it hard to believe they’ll actually just shut it down,” he said. “They’ve already sunk two billion dollars into it.” His studio shares the garage of his home, a town house in the West Village, with a Mini Cooper and a metalwork shop, where he designs and fabricates fixtures and furniture. Some aluminum frames of his own design held large-format prints of urban ruins and renewal. He’s been walking and shooting the West Side of Manhattan for half a century, from its most desolate period, in the mid-seventies, to the Erector-set frenzy of recent decades. “I like things in transition—construction, demolition, decay,” he said. His current preoccupation with building components, the subject of his new book, “Manhattan Project,” began in 2013, when Steve Witkoff, now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, started constructing a luxury apartment building on the lot across the street. “I spent a year just shooting materials from my window,” Staller said. Then came six years of lurking around Hudson Yards.
The Hudson River, half a block west of his house, was a tangle of ice. Staller, in East German army-surplus wool pants and felt-lined boots, and an olive-drab parka, trudged along a snowy sidewalk on the West Side Highway. “This is nice,” he said, pointing to panels of fence screen covered in graffiti, near the Standard hotel. “With a sidewalk in front of it, it usually looks like shit, but with the snow . . .” He climbed atop a filthy bank to get the right angle. “The excitement is if there’s something more to it than the thing I see.”
He turned east at the Gateway site, on Twenty-ninth Street. “A lot of people here know me already,” he said, nodding to a worker in a hard hat. Inside the fence line were cranes, fuel tanks, and spools of cable; a crew was splicing together cages of rebar to sink into the ground. He pressed his lens to a chain-link slot. “One of the problems is that a lot of the objects being picked have snow on them, so they don’t have that purity of line, but today there’s nothing airborne here anyway.”
On Thirtieth Street, an open gate gave him a clean shot of a panel of rebar that looked like an Afro pick. “You can’t go here,” a guard said.
“I hate the word ‘no,’ ” Staller said.
“It’s my job to say no.”
“You’re doing it.”
There were other sites to photograph, if the Gateway were to stay off-line for long. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal expansion, half a mile uptown, Staller trained his lens on giant tubes of steel rimmed with teeth—core drill sections, frosted with snow, like colossal ziti topped with mozzarella cheese—which a crane was hoisting into place. A horn blew, and a section went aloft. “This might be the money shot,” Staller said.
After a while, he made his way back down to the Gateway site. (His phone, when he got home, said he’d walked six miles.) He wanted a shot of the rebar cages welded together, in the twilight, before the whole thing had to shut down. “They’re not going to leave this huge project unfinished, as mysterious ruins for future Manhattanites, or whatever they’ll call themselves.” Not yet, anyway. Last week, the Trump Administration, responding to a judge’s order, released the funds. Construction is scheduled to resume this week. ♦