Discussing “Waterworks”

We take our water for granted; turn on the tap and it’s there. Yet New York City’s faucets are endpoints in a journey through a vast, sophisticated, and visually humbling infrastructure of aqueducts, tunnels, water mains, pipes, pumping stations, treatment plants, reservoirs, gatehouses and more.

Photographer Stanley Greenberg has spent over three decades documenting these public structures; the subject remains a constant source of fascination for him. Now he has published a completely re-designed and expanded version of his original 2003 book, with 362 photographs and a large two-sided insert map, all paying further tribute to the history, engineering, and beauty of our far flung water system.

Published by Kris Graves Projects, with maps co-created by Larry Buchanan, this redux volume – Waterworks: The Hidden Water System of New York – comes at a moment when public thinking about water resources is increasingly complicated, and awareness of a system that has been continually under construction since the 1830s is heightened.

Greenberg, Graves and Buchanan discuss the artistic work, and also help us grasp the systems that are so vital to our lives, in a conversation led by Mariana Mogilevich, editor in chief of Urban Omnibus. Leave with a new appreciation of what it takes to provide over a billion gallons of water a day to our city, and the beauty of the hidden structures that do the work.

Stanley Greenberg has been photographing the built environment since the early 1980s. He is the author of Invisible New York, Waterworks, Olmsted Trees, Springs and Wells, CODEX: New York, Time Machines, and Under Construction. Greenberg has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the MIT Museum, and his photographs have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Greenberg’s work is in the collections of the Yale Art Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, New York Public Library. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. Greenberg’s work was included in the Brooklyn Artists Show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2024. He is a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, New York.

Larry Buchanan is a reporter and graphics editor for The New York Times. He reports stories that use a variety of visual forms — maps, charts, diagrams, photographs, video — to explain the world better than words alone can. He also teaches journalism and mapmaking at Columbia University. Larry lives in Red Hook and loves New York City.

Kris Graves is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. Graves creates artwork that deals with societal problems and aims to use art as a means to inform people about cultural issues. Using a mix of conceptual and documentary practices, Graves photographs the subtleties of societal power and its impact on the built environment. He explores how capitalism and power have shaped countries — and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life. Graves also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life.

Mariana Mogilevich is editor in chief of Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League of New York’s publication dedicated to understanding, observing, and shaping the city. A writer and historian of architecture and urbanism, she is the author of The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York.

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