Culture

Photographing Staten Island, 100 Years Apart

A new exhibition explores the interplay in pictures separated by a century.
Alice Austen, [Self-Portrait with Bicycle], 1897. (Courtesy of Alice Austen House) Christine Osinski, Boy on Bicycle, 1983-1984. (©Christine Osinski)

In one frame, a woman stands beside her bicycle on a gravel road, a parcel tied neatly to her handlebars. She’s wearing a dress with puffy sleeves and a collar that swallows her neck.

The next frame shows a young boy, buck-toothed and with fluffed-up hair, balancing on his bike seat. Behind him, cars hug the shoulder near telephone poles; a sewer grate between the wheels nods to the web of infrastructure below the street.