Whether you’re in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, or Staten Island, there’s dozens of great places to photograph a New York City sunset. We’ve outlined our favorite spots around Gotham, so pack your neutral density filter and grab the last subway out before golden hour!

Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn

It’s no secret that Brooklyn Bridge Park revitalized Brooklyn’s post-industrial waterfront. This spot features a view of the Manhattan skyline and Brooklyn Bridge. Plus, it’s covered with lovely grass and dotted with repurposed buildings. So the atmospheric possibilities are many! If you stay a while, you can even get a shot of Jane’s Carousel lit up after dark.

Astoria Park, Queens

Known for its enormous pool, which is also the oldest and largest in New York, Astoria Park has lots to see. With two bridges (Triborough and Hell Gate) to choose from, plus trails, a bandstand, tracks, and more, it’s easy to populate your sunset shots. Plus, if you’re having a long wander with your camera, there are tons of benches to sit on and take in the sights.

The Highline, Manhattan

The beloved Highline is a New York institution. Covered with 350 species of perennials, grasses, shrubs, vines, and trees, this nearly two-mile park snakes through the West Side. It naturally faces the setting sun, and it’s one of the few places in the city that feels enmeshed in nature and metropolis. Hovering at 30 feet, you may never get a view of New York quite like this!

Van Cortlandt Park, Bronx

This lush park faces towards the Hudson River. With a small lake and abundant greenery, the city has mounted improvements to Van Cortlandt in recent decades. It also boasts fantastic trails, including some of the best cross country training trails in the United States.

Staten Island Ferry, Staten Island

Wait, wait! We know this sounds like a cop out, but hear us out. There are plenty of great places to watch the sunset in Staten Island. Some of our other favorites include the Alice Austen House and Wagner College. But nothing compares to the glory of having access to views of the Statue of Liberty and the South Manhattan skyline.

A NYC sunset is truly something to behold. Whether you’re facing into New Jersey or across the River into Manhattan, the city skyline makes a great shot at sundown.

Venezuelan Photojournalist Adriana Loureiro Fernandez, 29, never intended to get so political. “I didn’t even plan on getting involved with the resistance, but it was impossible to see everything happening and not be a part of it,” she says. Her series documenting the Venezuelan resistance, Paraiso Perdido, shows at Photoville this week.

Fernandez worked in fashion photography, but later transitioned to covering graffiti artists in her home town of Caracas. “For my master’s project I did a documentary about graffiti called Caracas by Night,” she says. “Back then the conditions in the city were a little bit different. You could still be a woman and go out at night.”

Of course, the work was still dangerous and illegal, so she never used a flash. Instead, Fernandez waited for a car or truck to pass to illuminate her subjects. “Back then, law enforcement was more focused on normal law enforcement – graffiti for example. Anything that would make you more visible was a no.”

Many of her subjects even carried knives and pepper spray to defend themselves. “I spent maybe two weeks going around and asking the prostitutes what they had in their bag. They had car batteries – the craziest things.”

It was only later, after the Venezuelan protests gained momentum, that Fernandez followed her graffiti artist friends to the front lines. “Some of the graffiti artists joined the protests,” she says. “But then they started leaving the country almost immediately – like all of them.” With the writing on the wall, many Venezuelan artists levied their skills to get out before the violence mounted. “Then I was left with nice connections within the Venezuelan resistance,” explains Fernandez. “The artists gave me street cred.”

From there, Fernandez transitioned seamlessly from Caracas by Night to Paraiso Perdido. With an eye for enhancing emotional depth and utilizing harsh light, she began snapping shots of decaying homes and emboldened police officers.

In one photograph, a stoop-shouldered protester in a gas mask visibly loses steam. “That night was hectic,” she says. “That confrontation lasted more than 3 hours, and at some point the gas was such that even with the gas mask you were suffocating – so was he. That guy in the picture was suffocating. In my mind I just went into automatic mode, and just started going. But you could also feel them wearing out. That image belongs to a set of 3 or 4 where they’re just moving around. He just stopped to take a break – to breathe.”

As the resistance continues to shift and change, Fernandez’s work evolves alongside it. She always tries to capture the human face of the conflict, wherever that takes her. “I really like the psychology coming through the eyes or gestures, but also the light and color. I just want [to photograph] the flow of what I experience through my subjects with a particular set of emotions.”

Focus Camera is sponsoring the EmergiCubes at Photoville. Stop by and check out Adriana Loureiro Fernandez’s work.

It’s time for another seasonal show roundup! This fall, there’s a lot to be thankful for. From Joel Meyerowitz’s haunting Between the Dog and the Wolf to the vibrant Women in Color exhibition at Rubber Factory, these are our top 5 photography shows to check out this season.

Claude Iverné: Bilad es Sudan at Aperture Gallery

September 15 – November 9, 2017

Mapping out historical and contemporary landscapes of Sudanese diaspora, Iverné’s work blurs boundaries between the anthropological and the personal.  A continuation of his 1999 exploration of North Sudan (Forty Days Trails), Bilad es Sudan unpacks the precipitous transformation of South Sudan, where due to the economic, cultural, and environmental changes, many of Iverné’s Sudanese subjects escaped to France. The exhibition unfolds into an epic journey between the deserts of Sudan and the outskirts of French cities.

Between the Dog and the Wolf by Joel Meyerowitz at Howard Greenberg Gallery

September 7 – October 21, 2017

“Between the dog and the wolf” is a common French phrase that signifies the oncoming twilight – the moment between the known and the unknown, savage and tame. Taken while Meyerowitz was spending summers at Cape Code, Between the Dog and the Wolf features photographs captured in this special light of vulnerability and imagination.

Using an 8×10 view camera, Meyerowitz captures a “whole way of seeing [that] was both challenged and refreshed. I found that time became a greater element in my work. The view camera demands longer exposures, and I began looking into the oncoming twilight and seeing things that the small cameras either couldn’t handle or didn’t present in significant enough quality.”

John Griebsch: Aerial Photographs at Carrie Haddad Gallery

August 9 – September 24, 2017

Whimsical and delightfully geographical, John Griebsch’s aerial photographs use pattern and color to communicate something both ancient and accustomed. “Familiar landscapes take on a fresh context when airborne,” says Griebsch. “There is the essential contribution of light. There is the position and altitude of the airplane, and there is a need to capture the stillness and composition of the moment while moving over the subject at more than seventy miles per hour.”

American Visionary: John F. Kennedy’s Life and Times at New York Historical Society

June 23, 2017 – January 07, 2018

The Kennedy administration rose alongside the golden age of photojournalism in the United States. From his private life to public trajectory, Kennedy drew the eye of documentary photographers such as Ed Clark, Lisl Steiner, Ralph Crane, Philippe Halsman, Ted Spiegel Jacques Lowe, Lawrence Schiller, Steve Schapiro, and Sam Vesta. One of the most exhaustingly researched collections of Kennedy photographs, American Visionary is an engaging Kennedy lens.

Women in Color at Rubber Factory

August 19 – September 27, 2017

This exhibition featuring pioneering work of women in color photography is vivid, dramatic, and alluring. Explorations of light and form come together in electric displays of collages, still life images, portraits, and more.

As the weather gets chillier, take some time to warm up in these exhibitions. It’s important to get your seasonal dose of art!

In early 2017, Carole Teller, a retired art teacher, approached Andrew Berman, the director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, with a box.  It was gathering dust in her East Village apartment, and contained a personal collection of photographs from the 1960s through the 1990s, some of New York’s most transitional years.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation works to “preserve the architectural heritage and cultural history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo.” They recently made Teller’s images available online as Carole Teller’s Changing New York, stating that “Carole captures the poignancy and beauty of a city in flux.”

“I was struck by the images,” Berman says. “I was struck by how dramatic and incisive they were. [Teller] captured pretty poignant, slice-of-life moments.”

Instead of simply adding the images to the organization’s archive, Berman chose to promote  them. News sites like Time Out Magazine, Gothamist and Bowery Boogie raved about the newly discovered photo series. NBC New York called the photos a “treasure trove.”  Berman agrees. “The photos are a really important record that tells us about the way our city has changed,” he says. “It’s easy to forget these things.”

While most of the photos capture the East Village, the series also depicts Brooklyn (where Teller grew up) and other parts of Manhattan. They often focus on architecture, as well as scenes on the street level. Even though Teller is an accomplished painter – currently affiliated with Gallery 71 and the Salmagundi Club – she never considered herself a photographer. When asked about her camera of choice, Teller says she used a simple old Pentax.“I’ve always taken photos, but it was never an organized effort,” she says. “I just take pictures.”

Teller explains that she never had the privilege of being an artistic “lady of leisure.” She always enjoyed painting, but needed to make a living. As a result, she taught art in New York City public schools for 32 years, putting her personal art on hold. However, she started painting again after she retired. Teller says that she didn’t really have a choice; she felt compelled to capture things. Much like her photos, her paintings detail city life, from skyscraper landscapes to intimate settings on rooftops. When she didn’t have time to paint during her teaching years, Teller took photos.

“The photos bring me back to that time,” she says. “They are really a visual diary of my life.”

For Teller, photography was a way to document the New York she saw around her and a way to remember it. But to GVSHP, the photos are much more than that, stating that “as a photographer, she had a keen and often prescient eye, capturing in her daily travels, people and places that struck her, but which were also often on the precipice of change or disappearing.”

When asked their feelings on how New York has changed, Teller and Berman offer similar sentiments. Teller feels nostalgic for that past, and misses a version of New York that was quirky and more individual. “Everything is more homogenized now,” she says. She stopped doing as much photography when everything became more digitalized.

Berman, who also grew up in New York, laments the city’s “loss of character,” stating that it used to feel more “gritty, spontaneous, and less programmed.”

While looking through the photos, it is very easy to focus on what the city has lost over the years. Many of Teller’s image descriptions contain the phrase “demolished.” Some photographs depict scenes of cranes and trucks coming to tear down the old and cart aged bricks away. One shows the NY Tribune Building near City Hall, which was demolished in 1966 and replaced with Pace University. One of her most popular photos features the beautiful old Penn Station before it was dismantled in 1963.

However, Teller and Berman also appreciate the changes in New York, as well as the more “programmed” world that comes with it. When discussing the process of bringing her photos to light, Teller says that “digitalization made it possible.” She went to Print Space on 21st street to have her old photos digitalized for the GVSHP archive. Meanwhile, Berman’s painstaking process of finding the location of each of the photos required tons of online research (and Google Street View).

Berman and Teller recognize the benefits that come with the changing New York.“The good over the last several decades is less crime. It’s cleaner, safer…” he says. Teller even found a home within her changing New York. One of her photos depicts a man standing in a building that is set to be demolished. As happenstance would have it, Teller later lived in the building that took its place.

“Whether you view the changes as good, bad, or you’re indifferent, people love these photos,” Berman says.

Berman’s favorite photograph showcases posters wheatpasted to a building. He was a “sniper” or “wheatpaster” when he was younger, and this photo reminds him of those days. Teller was unable to pick a favorite, but hinted that she had more to share. Perhaps we will soon have another batch of Carole Teller’s Changing New York to take us deeper.

Despite our lamentations for the past, change is an inevitable part of every city. That’s why it’s important for organizations like GVSHP to keep their photo archives, so that even as parts of the world are changed or demolished, we have a history to look back on. And Teller’s photos are even helping to do that. All the photo prints are available for purchase, with proceeds going to GVSHP and their cause. Thus, even as they are shared online and help us remember an older New York, Carole Teller’s photos help us preserve it as well.

The full collection of Carole Teller’s Changing New York is available on the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation Image Archive here. Prints of the collection are available for sale on the website with proceeds benefiting GVSHP.

All photographs copyright Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation/Carole Teller.