Soon after moving to New York I set out to learn the city in a manner suited to a person familiar with exploring on foot:  I walked, spending less that $10 in public transport in the course of a week, taking closeup photographs of any spot that seemed to merit documentation.

Many of the images, which I call micro-landscapes, show the ecology of Manhattan in a microcosm: the detritus that falls beneath our feet, to be recycled by microorganisms without hardly anyone stooping to notice what’s going on. Here is a small sample of these vistas of New York, underfoot.