The Newtown Pentacle

The big announcement is here, and it’s a photo book!

– photo by Mitch Waxman

In the Shadows at Newtown Creek is finally ready for public consumption, I’m proud to announce. 88 pages of full color photos encased in a perfect bound card stock cover edition, this is the first of several publications which Newtown Pentacle will be offering this year. This edition is a magazine format photo book, one embellished with minimal text beyond simple descriptions of location. It collects the night photography work which I’ve been engaged in for the last year around the Newtown Creek Superfund site at locations in Long Island City, Greenpoint, Maspeth, Ridgewood and East Williamsburg/Bushwick.

The sales price is $30, and here’s the link again.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’ve chosen blurb.com as the printer, who will handle ordering and fulfillment. Sample copies in hand look and feel great, and everybody whom I’ve shown them to has been blown away by the quality of their printing. I’m thrilled with it, and hope that everybody reading this will consider placing an order for a copy of the book. A not insignificant percentage of the sales price will end up in my pocket, which will help support this blog and the time and expense that go into producing it.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Many of the photos contained within “In the Shadows at Newtown Creek“ have been displayed at Newtown Pentacle soon after they were captured, such as the shot of the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge pictured above and of Maspeth Creek pictured below. The urban landscape around this highly industrialized waterway found at the heart of New York City is frankly spectacular, visually dynamic, and I have been working extremely hard to capture its vibrant spirit.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

For those of you new to the Newtown Pentacle and the world of Newtown Creek, I’m Mitch Waxman.

I’m the Newtown Creek Alliance historian, official photographer for the Working Harbor Committee, Steering Committee at Access Queens, and also a member of the NYS DOT’s Stakeholders Advisory Committee for the ongoing Kosciuszcko Bridge project. I’ve been offering walking, bus, and boat tours of the Newtown Creek watershed, and the greater harbor beyond, for nearly a decade. I’m a steering committee member of the Newtown Creek Superfund Community Advisory Group, serve as an ad hoc member of the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee (which provides citizen oversight of the DEP’s sewer plant project in Greenpoint), and I was a Parade Marshall for three of the NYC Bridge Centennial Committee celebrations back in 2009 including the Manhattan and Queensboro events. My photography of Newtown Creek and NY Harbor has appeared in National Geographic, the NY Times, Scholastic publications, lots of local websites and newspapers, several official NYC and NYC EDC publications, as well as a bi weekly column I used to write for Brownstoner about Westrn Queens. On June 9th of 2009, this blog – the Newtown Pentacle – was founded, on the day of the Queensboro Bridge centennial.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

For the last several years, the shots that I’ve captured which have really caught my eye have been the long exposure night time ones, and in the last year or so it was decided to “get serious” about low light urban landscape shooting. The results gathered from Newtown Creek are collected in this new book of mine. Blurb.com’s “In the Shadows at Newtown Creek” sales page offers an online (partial) preview which will give you an idea of the layout, and content, of this publication.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Geography governed the placement and sequence of the images presented, starting with Newtown Creek’s intersection with the East River and then ranging nearly 4 miles eastwards towards the bitter end of things at the English Kills tributary in Bushwick/East Williamsburg. Along the way, every bridge, important site, and tributary is visited – many of which are locations accessible only through jagged holes in chain link fences or through acts of physical derring do.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A chance to support for this blog, and a humble narrator, is offered. June 9th of this year will mark the tenth anniversary of this publication, which publishes five days a week and fifty two weeks a year. I’m beginning to think about doing some sort of event to celebrate the anniversary, as a note. Also, there will be more print publications later in the year.

“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30. I hope you’ll consider adding it to your library.

“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle