With...Photographer Joshua Lutz in the Jersey Meadowlands

I grew up on the fringe of the Meadowlands, an endlessly fascinating region of boggy land a few miles to the west of the Lincoln Tunnel connecting New Jersey and Manhattan. In part because of the challenges posed by the land, major real estate development was late in coming to the Meadowlands, which is now home to the Meadowlands Sports Complex, the ambitiously large Xanadu shopping center (currently under construction), and other projects. Much of the acreage is still wild or semi-wild, however. Over the years there has been a massive amount of dumping of industrial waste, regular garbage, and toxic crap in the Meadowlands. Before the Seventies (when the Sports Complex was built) they were viewed as pure junk-land. Overall the Meadowlands is about as mixed and weird an environment as you'll find anywhere near a major American city, and naturally it has an immense metaphoric potential because of that. It's put to excellent locational use throughout The Sopranos, as one might expect.

Photographer Joshua Lutz is understandably drawn to the visual potential of the Meadowlands; you never know what you might see there, the area never runs out of surprises. His large-format book Meadowlands is full of striking and varied photographs. But I think Lutz miscalculates in including no information about the provenance of the photographs: no dates, no locations, no notes as to context. I believe in the power of images, too, but this is asking too much of them. A little background information makes pictures more interesting, not less. Apart from an introductory essay by Robert Sullivan (blah) and a brief afterword by Lutz, the book is completely lacking in text -- and I think it would have benefited from some. An opportunity missed.