Hyperallergic posted a wonderful and poignant piece about the work of photographer Gail Victoria Braddock, whose recent project focused on Manhattan’s vanishing bodegas. The work highlights the city’s changing landscape and laments the disappearance of one of its cultural and architectural staples.

Gail Victoria Braddock Quagliata photographed every bodega in Manhattan from December of 2012 to August of 2013, and even in that short span she saw so many shutter that it became depressing to return for second shots. “These stores are important because they are the city,” she said in a talk last month presented by Atlas Obscura at ACME Studio in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn-based artist from Omaha, Nebraska started Every Bodega in Manhattan, she explained, while teaching in a Lower East Side art education program. While commuting she stopped in different bodegas on different routes “on a quest for an Anthora cup.” Searching, on the whole futilely, for that iconic Greek amphora-inspired cup got her intrigued by the differences between each store and how they distinctly reflected neighborhoods with their wares. Nikon in hand, she used a paper street atlas to mark off each Manhattan block as she documented this vanishing and uniquely New York place.

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