Nathaniel Popkin – författare

Philadelphia possesses an exceptionally large number of places that have almost disappeared-from workshops and factories to sporting clubs and societies, synagogues, churches, theaters, and railroad lines. In Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, urban observers Nathaniel Popkin and Peter Woodall uncover the contemporary essence of one of America’s oldest cities. Working with accomplished architectural photographer Joseph Elliott, they explore secret places in familiar locations, such as the Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street, the Divine Lorraine Hotel, Reading Railroad, Disston Saw Works in Tacony, and mysterious parts of City Hall.Much of the real Philadelphia is concealed behind facades. Philadelphia artfully reveals its urban secrets. Rather than a nostalgic elegy to loss and urban decline, Philadelphia exposes the city’s vivid layers and living ruins. The authors connect Philadelphia’s idiosyncratic history, culture, and people to develop an alternative theory of American urbanism, and place the city in American urban history. The journey here is as much visual as it is literary; Joseph Elliott’s sumptuous photographs reveal the city's elemental beauty.

Tracking the emergence of widespread color photography to the dawn of the digital age, Philadelphia in Color 1950-1990 features hundreds of street photographs, portraits, and family snapshots to document the evolution of architecture, fashion, and expression in American urban life. The depth and grandeur of human experience is recorded in more than 360 color images by more than 200 photographers—many never seen publicly. They are from the collections of famous photographers and architects, including Stephen Shore, Denise Scott Brown, Laurie Olin, and Harvey Finkle, as well as dozens of amateurs, many sourced from archives and family collections. Taken together, they express the passion, pride, resilience, endurance, and flamboyance of a city and its people.Philadelphia in Color also tells a far more complicated story of how Philadelphians reinterpreted and redefined their city. In essays that contextualize the images, the editors recount how the people of Philadelphia experienced the dramatic economic, racial, and cultural shifts during these decades of deindustrialization and flight.Philadelphia in Color fills a significant void in the city's visual history, while reframing the conversation about what kind of place Philadelphia was and might be. This is a civic portrait of Philadelphia as deep and dynamic as the city itself.