Over the course of several visits in 1984-1985, Peter Spaans was granted access by the MTA to photograph inside eight of New York City's subway storage and transfer yards. Whether in the Bronx, Jamaica, or Coney Island, the resulting images of empty trains, housing projects, and vast swaths of urban decay represent snapshots usually glimpsed from grimy elevated subway windows in the outer boroughs, or from cars while being whisked to an airport, a beach, or a ball game. They are not places one ordinarily stops to admire the scenery.Similar to the Becher's Düsseldorf School, Spaans' photographs have a feeling on the surface of detachment and cold documentation. There are few people and few signs of life. New York from the Yards could easily be seen as a topographical study of an anonymous city, employing a similar philosophy as the German photographers. Yet Spaans' images are quintessentially New York. His focus on the marginalia of a city still firmly rooted in the pre-Giuliani era exudes a strange romance, almost a spell, that only this city can provide. Concept, photographs, text and lay out: Peter Spaans, with text of Anneke Oele.