Steinway & Sons Piano Factory | Project Statement

We're each born into a moment of wonderment and of loss. It's different for each generation. As a photographer I'm interested most when they come together in a way that overwhelms me. Having been trained as an architect, I tend to see those qualities in certain old buildings and industrial processes, how what once were marvels of design, construction, and function fell gradually into oblivion. That was the underlying theme of my books "Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals" and "New York's Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway." In those books it was necessary to create for the viewer a whole that could only be assembled from parts that survived here and there, across the country or across the city.

My Steinway photographs are the opposite, a deconstruction of something we all know and love as a whole. The kind of manufacturing and craftsmanship that happens at One Steinway Place, where people transform raw, messy materials into some of the finest musical instruments in the world, has nearly vanished from the American workplace. This concerns me deeply, not only because I come from a musical family in which such craftsmanship was revered, but because I live at a time when fewer and fewer people make their own music. Steinway is not disappearing, not by any means, but the opportunity to look deep inside it revealed to me one of the supreme and most discerning accomplishments of the human hand and imagination.