Susan Anthony

Susan B. Anthony: Collar City is a quietly powerful photographic book that traces a decade-long relationship between an artist and a city shaped by industry, loss, and renewal. What began as a spontaneous winter visit in 2013 grew into a sustained act of looking, as Anthony returned again and again to Troy, New York, guided by curiosity and a deepening sense of attachment. Working with her Hasselblad, she approached the city with patience, allowing its rhythms and contradictions to unfold naturally over time.

Once a major center of steel production and brickmaking, Troy earned the nickname “Collar City” as the birthplace of the detachable shirt collar, an invention that transformed men’s fashion and fueled local prosperity. Like many post-industrial American cities, Troy later experienced economic decline, leaving behind abandoned factories, fading storefronts, and weathered infrastructure. Anthony’s photographs linger in these spaces, attentive to texture and light, revealing the dignity embedded in brick walls, cracked sidewalks, and aging façades marked by use rather than neglect.

Set against this industrial legacy are signs of renewal and continuity. Grand homes built from Troy brick still stand, their interiors adorned with marble fireplaces and luminous Tiffany windows. Anthony documents neighborhoods in transition, where restoration exists alongside decay, and where longtime residents and new arrivals share the same streets. Her portraits range from young children to elders who have witnessed decades of change, forming a multigenerational record of community life rooted in place and memory.

Rather than offering a nostalgic or purely documentary account, Collar City presents Troy as a living organism, shaped by labor, resilience, and human connection. Anthony’s background as a painter and printmaker is evident in her compositional sensitivity, while her editorial experience informs the clarity and restraint of her visual storytelling. The photographs neither romanticize hardship nor celebrate renewal uncritically; instead, they hold space for complexity.

As her first monograph, Collar City stands as a thoughtful meditation on American towns in flux and the quiet power of sustained attention. Through Anthony’s lens, Troy emerges not as a relic of the past, but as a vibrant, evolving community whose layered history continues to shape its present.