Desire Lines And Daylighting: 6/18-7/16, 2025 at Pier 57

2024-2025 Photo Urbanism Fellow, Photographer, and Journalist Nathan Kensinger documents efforts towards an equitable water future for New York.

In partnership with Pier 57, Kensinger’s Photo Urbanism exhibition Desire Lines and Daylighting follows local efforts to protect and expand access to New York’s waterways. Focusing on waterfront communities in The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, a mix of photographs, videos, and interviews uncover grassroots initiatives to reclaim and restore coastlines that have been polluted and cut off by industrialization.

The work will be on display at Pier 57’s public indoor living room space in Hudson River Park from June 18th 2025 to July 16th 2025. Join us for opening night on 6/18 at 6 pm! RSVP HERE. Subscribe for email updates about more upcoming exhibition events here.

This year’s Photo Urbanism theme was chosen alongside Design Trust’s 2025 Request for Proposals, a call for projects focusing on the relationship between New York and water in all its various forms–rain, oceans, rivers–and our multiple relationships with it–from construction, art, play, to drinking and sewage.

A full digital gallery will be made available after the exhibition’s run at Pier 57 in Summer 2025

Nathan Kensinger

2024-2025: Water

Nathan Kensinger is a Brooklyn based photographer, filmmaker, journalist, and artist whose work explores hidden urban landscapes, post-industrial ecologies, forgotten waterways, and coastal communities endangered by sea level rise and climate change.

Exhibition Preview

Desire Lines & Daylighting

Nathan Kensinger

Artist Statement

Over the past 15 years, Kensinger has created a series of photo essays, documentary films, public arts projects, and video installations about New York City’s changing waterfront. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, New York Times, PBS NewsHour, and National Public Radio, and exhibited by the Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, and Staten Island Museum. His films have screened internationally at the National Museum of Cinema in Italy, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and Danish Film Institute. Kensinger is a Senior Fellow at the NYC College of Technology’s Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center, and is currently directing a feature-length documentary about sea level rise and the future of New York.

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