Noted urban photographer Judith Turner won recognition in the late 1970s for her concentrated, abstract images of large-scale buildings, often still under construction. In 1980, John Hejduk wrote in an introduction to the book Judith Turner Photographs Five Architects (Rizzoli) that “her art has to do with fixed silences upon abstracted thoughts. She searches for an unforgettable moment, like it or not, and she reveals sparsities and densities—the basic substance of architecture.”

Often exhibited, her work is included in the photography collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of Photography. In 2000, Turner began taking her Pentax 645 to Times Square in order to capture the molten reflections of glass on glass in both old and new construction there. The six photographs reprinted here, all from full negatives without digital manipulation, are portraits, as Hejduk might say, of “the basic substance of architecture” at its most illusive as well as evocative.

A version of this article appeared in AN_07.29.2009.