Gary Duehr

Printed on metallic media, then crumpled into sculptural shapes, these photographs treat urban scenes as if they're fleeting, ghostly impressions. Rather than showing the "hard city" of buildings and concrete, the images represent the viewer's dreamlike consciousness.

This imaginary city intermingles inhabitant and city, identities and desires. There are illusions of scale and many-layered reflections.

The city is what one makes of it, and vice versa

Click here to see earlier iterations.

In these entryways to seats of power—including banking, media, and retail—the spaces appear almost sacred in their polished surfaces and lush adornments. Columns flank the revolving doors. Flags, abstract paintings and potted plants provide decoration. And along the street, the underside of power may also be glimpsed.

Taken at night or early morning, these photographs reveal no-man's-lands that are largely deserted, except for a guard or two. The vast floors glow under fluorescent illumination.

The effect is as massive and impenetrable as a military fortress or Greek temple—so that the supplicants are awed, made to believe that these edifices are eternal and immutable.

Taken from trains or elevated subways, these photographs capture glimpses of the urban cityscape streaming past: a patch of roof, some shrubbery, the smear of a high rise.

In a way, the speed can be thought of as erasing the scenery, smudging its tones, blending together the land and sky.

Sometimes the sky's brightness overwhelms. Or a striated railing obliterates the view. It's as if the solidity of things comes into question—as if the cityscape might, at any moment, vanish completely.

"Erasures" is less about what’s out there than what flies past the corner of the eye.

To see Erasures from other cities, click here.

For monoprints from Erasures: Miami, click here.

Airport terminals are an end point, a final period. Here cement and sky intersect, and people move seamlessly through glassy corridors.

Although the surfaces are hard and sleek, there is also a sense of a floating mirage. Like a city unto itself but not quite real, airport terminals literally and metaphorically transport you.

Derived from satellite imagery, "Glitches" explores the boundary between mapmaking and landscape photography. On a mountainous plain, there are looming buildings and clutches of bungalows.

Skeletal structures and jagged shapes come into play where surveillance technology breaks down. The landscape evokes an apocalyptic, sci-fi future.

"Glitches" addresses how we perceive the world, how we make sense of it, and how we try to bring it under our control.

Sampled from the urban flux, these minimal compositions isolate and highlight intriguing juxtapositions.

There are layered reflections in windows and screens of chainlink fencing, as well as peeks down alleys and into parking lots. The images are mostly devoid of human presence, except for the occasional cameo.

A kind of artificial order is imposed. Things click into place when seen from a certain vantage point. There is no photograph until there is one.

To see more Extractions, click here

These images are inspired by the French term coined by the Spanish architect Ignasi Solà-Morales Rubió, which describes abandoned areas, undefined and unused, found on the borders of cities.

Here the spaces are blank interiors, empty spaces behind the scenes that suggest a theatrical event about to begin just off camera. The setting is an elevator, the corner of a lobby, a construction site.

Human life is largely absent, and the materials are industrial, anonymous: a factory-made Beckett scene.

Look up, if you dare, and everything converges: skyscrapers, traffic signals, power lines, flags. A brilliant sun lights up a vast blue sky, cut up into jigsaw pieces.

The view is the diametrical opposite of bird's-eye, perhaps ant's-eye or at least pedestrian's-eye. Over our heads the world revolves around our singular vision, reminding us how insignificant we are.

Does glancing up steeply invoke the same vertigo as peering over the edge of a rooftop? It may be that we are already falling and just don't know it yet.

Click here to buy a 20-page book of “Vertigo” photographs.

Click to see “Vertigo” images from other cities.

A linear greenway built on a former railroad spur, The High Line cuts an elevated path between galleries, luxury condos and industrial warehouses on Manhattan’s West Side.

These photos capture the mix of nature and urban, the gritty architecture, and The High Line’s prime views for people-watching during a stroll along the park’s 1.45 miles.

An interlinked series of pedestrian footbridges, The Minneapolis Skyway connects various buildings in 80 full city blocks over 11 miles downtown. It is the longest continuous system in the world.

The Skyway connects the second or third floors of various office towers, hotels, banks, offices, restaurants, and stores. Several condominium and apartment complexes are connected as well, allowing residents to live, work, and shop downtown without having to leave the skyway system.

The Skyway is like vision of a future metropolis, or of a fantasy city imagined by Italo Calvino. Luminous passageways overlook busy city streets, making it a prime site for people-watching.

From the vantage point of the Chicago River, you can look up past the many ornate steel bridges to glimpse the city’s unique architecture.

Since most of downtown was destroyed b the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, the city became a blank slate for a number of noted architects, including Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham—and, later, Mies van der Rohe.

The Chicago style is noted for its originality more than its age.

Taken in working class neighborhoods around Greater Boston, these photographs capture the brilliant colors of triple deckers packed together. In between there are glimpses of chain link fences and unruly vines, neat porches and patches of bright blue sky reflected in windows.

The images veer close to abstraction, but they remain rooted in the gritty stuff of everyday lives.

These views between houses reveal the complex layering of daily life.

These neighborhoods in Greater Boston are packed with triple-deckers spaced a driveway apart, marked off by chainlink and orange traffic cones. Like peering into an archaelogical dig, these photographic vistas show roofs and fences and telephone poles several blocks deep.

The driveways are a personal space that's open for viewing: the cars and milk crates, trash bins and clay pots, plus whatever detritus overflows from the yard. The photographs are a record of what happens between things, while life goes on elsewhere.

Taken in hotel rooms, these images reveal the emptiness of life while traveling: bare white walls and ceilings, interrupted by a lighting fixture or gold mirror. Of living stripped of anything personal, more llke floating in a void.

Look closer, and tiny flaws appear. A rip in the wallpaper, a smudge on a glass.

That bed, reflected in the requisite flat-screen TV, could be anyone's. On that wrinkled sheet the impression of an anonymous body. The subject becomes as vacant as his surroundings.

Holy Land is an 18-acre theme park in Waterbury, Connecticut, inspired by selected passages from the Bible. It features a chapel, stations of the cross, and replicas of catacombs and Israelite villages constructed from cinder blocks, bathtubs, and other discards.  After being closed to the public in 1984, the park underwent decades of vandalism; it reopened in 2014 and is being gradually restored.

Holy Land is like an abandoned movie set for a biblical epic, with its crumbling towers and paths overtaken by weeds. The whitewashed structures stand out against the hillside overlooking the city of Waterbury, and the park's tall illuminated cross can be seen for miles.

The sayings etched into stones remind me of religious stories for children. I have tried to capture the poignancy of Holy Land’s faded grandeur.

In these photos, house-roofs tilt against an expanse of sky. The structures are tethered by power lines and thrown into deep shadow.

Instead of offering shelter, these dwellings teeter on the edge. Each house stands singular, alone, a place less of comfort than of alienation.

Click here to see panoramas

These extended-frame images explore the luminosity and complexity of marshes. At times the pictures seem like drawings made up of haphazard lines of reeds, or like painterly renditions of a pond's depths.

A blot of sun is mirrored on the water's surface. A broken stalk lies akimbo. The lush green of algae forms a mottled screen. When these layers overlap and interfere with each other, they are reminiscent of a geometrical moiré pattern.

The images suggest stillness, contemplation, much like Japanese screens.

In the not-too-distant future, the city is a ghost town that no one dares to enter. It has become a toxic wasteland ruled by warring gangs and surrounded by barbed wire

The poorest are left fighting for survival, while gangs are competing for territory. Few dream of escaping their hardscrabble existence.

Recalling everything from Mad Max to Beckett, “Dog World” reveals a stylish post-apocalyptic vision.

These images of cities, mostly taken from above, look quite realistic until you zoom in. Things are a little too perfect, the sunsets too photogenic, the figures on the street too composed.

“Facsimilies” are closeups of architectural models of real cities, recreated in miniature scale. They could be seen as utopian or bleakly apocalyptic, depending on your view of 20th-city values stripped down to their core.

In these Lilliputian metropolises, trolleys rumble past, crowds gather at monuments, and a timeless present unfolds.

Taken from a bus or train, these urbanscapes are filtered through the windows' geometric mesh.

Looming buildings become a pattern of polkadots. Stoplights turn into red blotches of punctuation, amidst jagged streaks of poles and street signs.

More graphic than photographic, the city is revealed as an atomic structure of interlocking bits of data.

Here is an up-close and personal look at Charleston, SC, reflecting its chichi shops, foodie dens, and multimillion mansions along the Battery, as well as its history of racial turmoil.

Known as the Queen City for 250 years, Charleston is a crazy quilt of high and low, from Red Moon Margaritas in rooftop bars to Gullah women weaving baskets with sweetgrass on sidewalks.

While over everything arches a porcelain-blue sky broken up by dramatic arcs of palm trees.

To see more photos along city streets, click here.

Like a rainy night in a film noir, these images appear like phantoms through the drops of a splattered windshield.

Big globs of red and yellow form abstractions, while other street scenes reveal shreds of billboards or ghost-like taxis floating by. Humans are largely absent, except for an umbrella or two or passerby on a crosswalk.

The world outside is vague, ambiguous, a drifing orb of light and color.

After dark the city takes on a whole new prospect.

Whether trolling through Chinatown, surveying the local hood with chainlink fences, or catching blurry glimpses out a bus window, the city is transformed.

Colors intensify and what’s not essential fades to black. It’s the urban fabric as a kind of stage set.