David Rothenberg – Roosevelt Station

A middle aged man in Muslim dress walks through purple light.
Amn old man with a suit and cane walks briskly through the turnstiles.
A family pause and gaze at the timetable.
Two women check their phones.
A lone man bathed in purple light descends the station stairs.
An older man slouches and holds the handrail as he makes his way slowly down the stairs.
Outside the station, an old man passes a corner shop.

Roosevelt Station is a series of candid photographs of people enveloped by the cathedral-like light of the Roosevelt Avenue / 74th Street train station in Jackson Heights, Queens in New York. These photographs show commuters, airport-bound travelers, panhandlers, missionaries and others as they pass through the station during the morning rush hour, suspended in the glowing magenta, orange and green tinted light beaming from the station’s transom windows. The subjects in the photographs, mostly engaged in mundane daily routines, are made theatrical by the otherworldly light that falls during the morning hours.

David Rothenberg is a photographer and educator based in Queens, New York. He earned an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from Parsons School of Design. In 2017, Rothenberg’s work was included in the exhibition On Freedom at the Aperture Foundation Gallery in New York. Rothenberg is the recipient of a 2018 Queens Art Fund New Works Grant for his project Landing Lights Park. In Fall 2018, ROMAN NVMERALS published the project as a limited edition photography book. TIME Magazine named Landing Lights Park one of the “Best Photobooks of 2018.” Rothenberg’s work has been published and written about in the The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Die Zeit and featured on The New Yorker’s Instagram account.