Works in Progress

The images are interesting, but from the description it made it sound more like a collection of the modernist (Strand, Walker, etc.) visions of industrializing America, and less just a prosaic collection of construction photos. It's the latter. That's it. OK for what it is, but meh.

"The thrill of watching a building go up is compounded a hundredfold when that building also happens to be a world landmark. Through historical photographs, Works in Progress invites us behind the construction fences of over eighty well-known structures--from the Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge, to the space shuttle Endeavour. The urban skyscrapers, public monuments, bridges, theaters and stadiums pictured in the book are organized chronologically, so as to describe the evolution of both building styles and of photography over the past 150 years. The author describes each site in a short essay, providing facts about the work's creation drawn from news accounts, architects' records, and other archival sources. The images reproduced in the book were taken both by eminent practitioners--the likes of Mathew Brady, Lewis Hines and Walker Evans--and by lesser-known ones."By Alvin Rosenbaum. 208 pages, size: 10 x 12". 112 dutone photographs. Casebound book, with dust jacket. ISBN: 0-87654-069-8.""--© Pomegranate