As you can see from the photographs, my early impressions were quite romantic because there was a great deal of beauty in those buildings and the way the light touched them. Each one in Wall Street, downtown Manhattan, the Battery and Lower Broadway has a personality of its own and is unlike those that rose up after the war. From then on, too many huge, shapeless buildings like the World Trade Center were designed solely for maximum profit."
~ Fred Zinnemann
(1907 - 1997)
Aside from his great success as a director in Hollywood, Fred Zinnemann’s photography carries a power and historical resonance equal to his films. For a young Austrian immigrant encountering New York City for the first time, the experience must have been visually shocking. What he saw in its buildings—a sense of beauty and romance—feels tied to an era of design we rarely encounter today.
Perhaps for most passersby, this architecture had already become invisible, absorbed into the rhythm of daily life. But it took someone like Zinnemann, an outsider, to truly notice it—to see and feel the romance embedded in these structures. His photographs remind us of a way of looking that has, in many ways, been lost.