In a new series of eight photographs commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for the Photography program, fine-art photographer Lynn Saville captures a unique moment at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue in New York’s ever-changing architectural landscape. For the first time in nearly a century, the western façade of Grand Central Terminal has been revealed to uninterrupted, sweeping view. Five buildings spanning an acre-size city block were demolished to prepare for the construction of One Vanderbilt, a 1,401-foot office tower completed in 2020. 

Lynn Saville specializes in photographing "the boundary times between night and day," such as early morning or in the evening. Her long- exposure, large-format photographs are typically of built spaces and artificial as well as natural light, often in contrast together. Saville reimagines an everyday environment as a cinematic film set discovered by the artist’s eye through framing and timing.  

The images in this series show dappled light refracted from nearby glass skyscrapers, creating patterns of light on stone and pedestrians passing by. The train terminal juxtaposed with the Chrysler building creates iconic imagery of historic Beaux-Arts and Art Deco monuments, underlined by the One Vanderbilt foundation site, the architecture of the future. Visiting multiple times at dawn, midday, and dusk, from different heights in nearby buildings and on the ground, Saville skillfully captures the changing light across the western face of the terminal, and the humans that that activate the space during classic New York City rush hour, as well as at quiet moments of everyday life. 

Grand Central Revealed: Photographs of the west facade was generously sponsored by Duggal and Kodak alaris.

Fine-art photographer Lynn Saville was educated at Duke University and Pratt Institute. Saville specializes in photographing cities and rural settings at twilight and dawn, or as she describes it, “the boundary times between night and day.” 

Her photographs are published in four monographs: Acquainted With the Night(Rizzoli, 1997); Night/Shift, with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto (Random House/Monacelli, 2009); Dark City, with an introduction by award winning critic Geoff Dyer (Damiani, Bologna, 2015) and Lost: New York (Kris Graves Projects, New York, 2018). Saville’s photography is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York and is in the permanent art collections of major museums, corporations, and individuals. She lives in New York City with her husband, the poet Philip Fried.