Book Review The American photographer's new book transforms the city's endless construction sites into otherworldly visions. April 24, 2026 — 3 min read Jan Staller, “Yellow Nuts” (2018) (all photos courtesy the artist and 5 Continents Editions) For 50 years, the photographer Jan Staller has been showing us how strange we really are. His images depict humanity’s vast upheaval of the landscape, capturing both its inadvertent lyricism and the towering hubris of our built environment. His groundbreaking night photography from the 1980s and ’90s, shot in color and collected in the 1997 monograph On Planet Earth: Travels in an Unfamiliar Land , transforms industrial sites and New York streetscapes into otherworldly visions — unpeopled, eerily glowing, inscrutable. Staller’s new book, the slyly titled Manhattan Project , represents both a departure from and a continuation of his fascination with humanity’s drive to build new worlds.…