Nathan Kensinger has been documenting climate crisis impacts in New York for over twenty years. During this time, he has come to see the city’s waterways as living threads that tie together people, memory, and infrastructure.

Like many global cities, New York City was built on water. As the foundation of commerce, manufacturing, transportation, eating and drinking, water was the force behind everything life sustaining that allowed the city to thrive. 

The health and wellness of New Yorkers continues to depend on water today, extending beyond the base of our goods, services, and utilities, to being a pillar of the city’s culture. For generations, New Yorkers have gathered around public pools, boat tours, and ocean beaches. Local ingenuity has turned sidewalk leaks into informal aquariums. Cracked open fire hydrants cool down children and families in NYC summer streets. Water, in all its forms, is a member of our community, and New Yorkers have felt a kinship towards it since the city’s beginnings.

This year’s Photo Urbanism exhibition, Desire Lines and Daylighting, is an exploration of New Yorkers’ relationships to water–a documentation of the ways we access it, and why. The exhibition is on view for free at Pier 57 along the Hudson River waterfront, until this Wednesday, July 16th. 

A photographer, documentarian, and journalist, Photo Urbanism Fellow Nathan Kensinger thinks of his art as a tool for understanding New Yorkers’ relationship with their urban environments, built or natural. For this fellowship, Nathan has returned to familiar waterways, photographing efforts to create equitable water futures for New York City. 

Nathan explains that the exhibition’s title, Desire Lines and Daylighting, is a poetic representation of water access in two different ways: 

Throughout the city, informal trails to waterfronts are carved out by footsteps along the water’s edge. These paths are called “desire lines,” because of how they manifest a desire to get to the water. 

In the architecture context, daylighting is a design method used to allow natural light to illuminate a space. Speaking with Rebecca Pryor, Guardians of Flushing Bay’s Executive Director, allowed Nathan to realize that daylighting can also apply to bringing hidden waterways back into public consciousness–bringing them to light.

Desire Lines and Daylighting bridges these two concepts in conversation with each other: Half of the exhibit shows those makeshift trails etched into the landscape by our pull toward the water. The other half documents the work of community members to make water’s edges more accessible. 

Throughout the fellowship, Nathan has connected with people he refers to as the stewards of New York City’s waterways: folks doing the slow and steady work of transforming access and awareness to water. Some of these stewards are organizations, many are individuals who frequent their local water’s edge with families, dogs, and fishing poles. Often it’s someone who might just be cleaning up one little street end themselves.

Each waterway steward has a unique relationship to their space, making them an expert in their field. For Nathan, it is their knowledge and stories that bring the city’s waterways to life.

That’s why, when going out to photograph, Nathan approaches the spaces with awareness and respect. Before pulling out the camera, he makes sure to check in with the people in that space, say hello, and explain his work. Even if it’s a public waterfront, he says, “This is someone’s space. These are their spaces. We should respect that.” 

Some people-made desire lines now lead to formalized spaces of gathering. Along the industrial banks of Newtown Creek, for example, dead-end streets have been transformed into parklets. Referred to by Nathan as a collective “labor of love,” these transformations depend on both the community members’ desire to get to the water, and the groups pooling resources to foster that connection.

For Nathan’s exhibition, connecting with organizations like the Guardians of Flushing Bay, Newtown Creek Alliance, and Bronx River Alliance, is not just to document their work, but to build and strengthen relationships. Many of these community groups have been doing this work for over a decade, which Nathan knows from previous projects. This fellowship has given Nathan the opportunity to return for updates on how their work is going. He asks them: What are they focusing on now? What progress has been made? How have their projects shifted over time? Their tireless efforts to support and transform water access is the basis of the exhibition.

As part of the Fellowship, Nathan led a workshop-based fellowship with six young photographers. The workshops taught photography as a technical skill, but also as a way to observe and engage with the urban environment. With three different photography techniques, the youth fellows photographed and experienced the water’s edge at three different sites. 

First, the youth fellows took polaroids to the Newtown Creek nature walk, which has the largest public access area to the creek’s water.

Next, they worked with DSLR photography of the Gansevoort Peninsula at Hudson River Park. This is one of the only places in Manhattan where you can get down into the Hudson River and touch the water.

Lastly, along the South Bronx shoreline, the fellows used their phone cameras to document the contrast between the dead-end streets and new developments along the waterfront. 

Because the youth fellows were coming from different parts of New York, their individual versions and understanding of the city was unique, differing from each other’s as well as from Nathan’s. Bringing these perspectives together added to the richness of the workshops, and allowed their relationships to the city’s water to grow. 

Initially, most of the youth fellows didn’t know the names of each site, and said they did not know how to get to the water. But as the workshops progressed, it became clear that their connection to waterways was much stronger than they thought. 

One youth fellow knows Newtown Creek as her favorite skate spot. While she didn’t necessarily know the name of the creek, her stories about the area showed Nathan she knew more about the site than he did himself.

Another youth fellow, on the final weekend, waded knee-deep into the water to get a shot, something Nathan says he would have never done at the start of the workshops. The moment stuck with Nathan as a sign of growth, not just in terms of photographic methods, but of the fellows’ relationship to the city’s water.

After twenty years of documenting NYC’s waterways, Nathan has seen how our relationship to water is constantly shifting. “For much of the last century, New York turned its back on the water,” he says. But as the industrial era recedes and new developments replace waterfront manufacturing structures, public access to the shoreline is becoming more popular, raising complex questions about equitable access. 

Outside of Photo Urbanism, Nathan is working on a feature-length documentary around NYC’s evolving relationship with the waterfront, particularly in the face of sea level rise and climate change. A consideration of how NYC can evolve into the future, Nathan says the film is for anyone who loves New York—or any city built near water. His goal for the film is to communicate that how we approach climate catastrophe mitigation here in NYC could serve as a playbook for cities around the world.

Join us for a conversation with the advocacy groups featured in Desire Lines and Daylighting, and last chance to view the exhibition, this Wednesday, July 16th at 6pm! RSVP here. If you miss the exhibition, a digital gallery of Nathan's photos and the youth photographers' work will be available at photourbanism.org later this month.