THE BRONX, NY.- The Bronx Museum of the Arts has commissioned the award winning photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao to range throughout the streets, parks, and alleys surrounding the Grand Concourse and create a photographic portrait of the borough of the Bronx as it is today—vital, teeming, and changing. The photographic commission came as part of the Museum’s year-long commemoration of the centennial of the storied Grand Concourse.

Liao’s Bronx series features several vast and virtuosic panoramas of the Grand Concourse, including two 128-foot wide, hyper-detailed panorama of every building on the thoroughfare, which seems to envelope the viewer, and an incredible south-facing view from high atop Tracy Tower. Other photographs burrow into the quotidian. In a picture of a crowded barber shop, Liao’s eye seems to settle on a television screen of talking heads, a barber bent over a drowsy young boy, and an older boy gazing at a computer screen under a mirror that catches the barber. The viewer marvels at the color, surfaces, and gestures, the incident and seeming accident, packed into this picture of an ordinary afternoon.