New York rarely stops moving. The rhythm of the subway, the honk of impatient horns, the relentless press of footsteps on concrete - the city demands motion. Most of us move through it in a blur, our attention fixed on the next destination, the next notification, the next task.
The result is a quiet tragedy: we stop seeing the city. Bridges, parks, ferries, squares, and many special spaces of gathering - the very things that knit our civic life together - become mere backdrops to our private routines. We rush past what was built for us and what we must care for.
That's why Mikko Takkunen's New York photo series feels like a revelation. The Finnish photographer and New York Times photo editor brings to the city the same eye that captured Hong Kong's hidden poetry. His images slow the city down. They strip away noise and distraction, showing New York not as a blur but as a series of deliberate, astonishing human creations. In doing so, they remind us that attention is the first act of stewardship.
We live at a time when images are everywhere- scrolling endlessly across our screens, popping up in our feeds, flashing past in seconds. We are bombarded with pictures designed to provoke or sell, but rarely to deepen. In this context, Takkunen's work feels almost radical. His photographs don't demand a quick reaction. They demand a pause. They ask us to look carefully, to ponder, to reassess what we think we know about the spaces we inhabit.
As philosopher Matthew Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head, attention is a form of agency. What we choose to notice shapes what we value, and what we value ultimately shapes our democracy. When we fail to notice our shared surroundings, when our eyes are perpetually turned inward or downward, we begin to lose the habits of care that civic life requires.
Takkunen's photographs push back against that erosion. They reawaken our capacity to see.
The Bridge as a Constellation
The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, known to most as the 59th Street Bridge, opened in 1909. It is an essential artery, carrying thousands of people and millions of stories every day. Its purpose is purely practical: to move bodies and goods between Manhattan and Queens. Over time, it has faded into the background, a piece of infrastructure so familiar that it becomes invisible.
For me, the bridge has always been more silhouette than structure. I've never walked it. I've ridden my bike across it, passed beneath it countless times on the FDR, glimpsed its towers while crossing in a cab, felt its presence without really seeing it. It has been a backdrop, not a subject—useful, dependable, helping me arrive at a particular destination, but rarely noticed.
Takkunen changes that.
In one of his most haunting photographs, the bridge all but disappears. The entire field is black: no river, no sky, no surrounding city. Out of that darkness, a thin thread of white lights traces the suspension cables, fragile and precise. At the top of each tower, a single red beacon flashes softly, guiding aircraft overhead.
And that's all. The steel, the stone, the massive physical weight of the bridge—gone.
What remains is pure outline, a constellation drawn by human hands. It is at once functional and transcendent. In Takkunen's frame, the bridge becomes a floating idea, a quiet testament to human ingenuity. It reveals what I have missed in my own motion: that even the most practical structures can hold beauty and wonder, if only we stop to see them.
This is more than an aesthetic insight. As urbanist Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the physical design of a city shapes its social life. Bridges, parks, sidewalks, these are not just structures; they are stages for civic interaction. When we stop noticing them, we begin to neglect the relationships and responsibilities they sustain.
Takkunen's image of the Queensboro is a reminder that infrastructure is not neutral. It carries the weight of collective history and shared purpose and a city's ambition, poise, and vision. To see it is to begin to care for it.
Central Park and the Towers
Central Park tells a different story. It was never meant to fade into the background. Conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the mid-19th century, it was a radical civic experiment: a green commons carved out of urban chaos, open to all, free of charge, and designed to foster what Olmsted called "unconscious recreation."
When you stand in the park and look south, you see another kind of human ambition: the row of ultra-slender towers along 57th Street, the so-called "Billionaires' Row." These needle-like skyscrapers seem almost impossible, rising so high they appear to pierce the clouds. They are feats of engineering and symbols of global capital, inspiring both awe and unease.
In many ways, they are the anti-Olmsted: private wealth manifested in public view.
Takkunen's images capture this tension. In his photographs, the towers shimmer like glass blades while the park below sprawls organic and irregular. The juxtaposition is striking: the deliberate geometry of human construction set against the natural forms of trees, rocks, and rolling lawns.
Looking at these images, I am reminded of Robert Putnam's work on social capital. In Bowling Alone, Putnam argues that shared public spaces and institutions are essential for building trust across differences. Central Park was designed for precisely this purpose. The towers, by contrast, symbolize a kind of vertical segregation, spaces that only a few will ever enter, looming over a park that belongs to everyone.
Takkunen doesn't moralize. He doesn't need to. His photographs let the viewer sit with the tension: nature and ambition, public and private, the city we inherited and the city we are still building.
The Ferry and Rediscovering Wonder
One of Takkunen's photographs shows an East River Ferry gliding across dark water, an outline of passengers in tow, the city's lights scattered behind it like reflections on glass.
I take that ferry regularly. Most days, I barely look up and take even a moment to ponder the environment around me. My attention is on the tasks of the day ahead, but rarely on the river beneath my feet, the skyline around me, or even the color of the sky.
My son sees it differently.
When he rides the ferry, he runs straight to the rail, his face lit by the glow of the city. He leans into the wind, breathes in the salt air, and watches the towers and bridges slip past as if they were miracles. For him, every crossing is an adventure, a moment of pure discovery and wonder.
When I saw Takkunen's photograph, it stopped me cold. It captured my son's experience, not mine- the magic I'd forgotten. Through his lens, the ferry became more than transit. It was a reminder that this city is not just a place to move through, but a place to marvel at and be inspired by.
The Power of Photography in an Age of Overload
Photography has a power that words alone cannot match. It can make us pause, reconsider, and see the world anew. This is especially valuable now, in an age of relentless digital saturation.
Social media bombards us with images designed to shock or sell. As media critic Neil Postman warned decades ago, when everything becomes entertainment, we risk losing our ability to think seriously about what we see. Today, as Zeynep Tufekci has argued, our feeds are flooded with visual noise: outrage, envy, distraction, endless stimulation.
Most of these images pass through us without leaving a trace. They are consumed and discarded in seconds, forgotten almost as quickly as they appear.
Takkunen's work offers the opposite. His photographs are not quick hits of dopamine. They are sustained invitations to ponder. They slow our perception. They train us to look again at the world around us, to notice its textures, its patterns, its moral weight.
As Matthew Crawford writes, attention is the foundation of freedom. To see clearly is to choose freely. By helping us see, Takkunen helps us reclaim a measure of agency in a culture that often seeks to hijack it.
Seeing as Civic Duty
This is not just an aesthetic gift. It's a civic one.
When we stop noticing the city, we stop caring for it. A bridge becomes "just a bridge." A park becomes "just a park." A ferry becomes "just a ride." But these things are not inevitable. They exist because generations before us built them, maintained them, and believed they were worth the effort. They endure because we choose to preserve them.
Edmund Burke famously argued that society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. Our public spaces embody that partnership. The Queensboro Bridge was built by people long gone, for the sake of people not yet born. Central Park was imagined as a democratic experiment to serve generations who had not yet arrived. Even the ferry routes we take for granted are the result of choices made decades ago about what kind of city we wanted to be.
My son's wonder is natural. Mine must be chosen.
If we want to pass on a city worthy of him, we must teach him - and ourselves - to pause, to notice, to appreciate. Seeing is the first step toward belonging. Belonging is the first step toward stewardship.
As Yuval Levin, my colleague at AEI, often reminds us, institutions thrive when we recognize them not as platforms for personal expression but as frameworks of shared responsibility. The same is true of the city itself. It is not a stage set for our individual performances. It is a common inheritance, and its survival depends on our willingness to see and to serve.
A Call to Look Again
The next time I pass beneath the Queensboro, glance south from Central Park, or step aboard the ferry, I will try to see as Takkunen sees and pause, if only for a moment, to let this remarkable built world move me. For when we lose sight of what we’ve created, we risk losing it altogether.
Photography alone cannot save a city. But it can remind us why cities matter. It can reveal how beauty and function, past and future, private ambition and public good are bound together in the places we share.
In a culture of constant motion and shallow seeing, that reminder becomes a quiet act of resistance and an essential one. By looking closely, we not only rediscover our surroundings, we remember that cities are living communities, held together by care and attention. Past generations built with this sense of stewardship, and it falls to us to do the same: to see clearly, build wisely, and protect what we’ve been entrusted to preserve.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
Photo: 59th Street Bridge, aka The Queensboro Bridge by Fraser Mummery via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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