Rafael: Good evening and welcome to "MetroFocus."

I'm Rafa room on.

Documenting lower Manhattan's transformation from the rough-and-tumble to the playground for the rich.

In the process, are often striking and always moving black and white photographs have captured a unique UT that often goes unnoticed.

Her new book of photography, "a falling off place," turns her lens to a seemingly unglamorous part, the Fulton Fish market of the 1980's and the unchanging streetscapes of the 1990's and the post-9/11 lower Manhattan of the new millennium.

Her photographs have been exhibited at MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and at other venues here and around the world and she joins us now.

Barbara, welcome to the program.

Let me start with the obvious question.

How did you decide -- why did you decide to put this collection of photographs in this book?

What moved you?

Barbara: Several years ago I was asked by the Howard Hughes Corporation and a celebrity chef to do an installation of my photographs at the newly renovated tin building.

So as a result of that, I had to go through all of my early photographs and work on the project and proposal.

In that activity, I realized I had all of these photographs that I had not considered before.

That was basically the impetus.

Rafael: The book is divided into three parts, the 80's, 90's, and new millennium.

Let's start with part one, the 1980's which is almost completely dominated by the Fulton Fish market.

A neighborhood you called the market, a place you spent a lot of time at.

What drew you to this world that was dominated by gritty, working-class men, and in the background, always the connections to the mob or rumors to the connections to the mob?

What drew you to it?

Barbara: I moved into that area which at that time was largely uninhabited.

But if you walked around at night, you would start to see this uninhabited neighborhood come alive with all these very intense men, working with their physical hands and doing physical labor.

I was very very intrigued by what was going on down there and I felt through my whole life very competitive with men and I wanted to really try and do a story about their lives and what went on down there.

Rafael: From the intimate portraits you capture, of the place and of the people, it is obvious that they welcomed you into their community.

How difficult was that?

Barbara: It took years.

You have to remember that the most important thing to know about this situation was at the time that I started photographing down there, it was the time when Rudolph Giuliani was a federal prosecutor doing his investigations into criminality at Fulton Fish market, the mob.

So it was sort of like a doubly difficult situation because the men thought I was a federal agent.

Rafael: Wow.

Well, obviously, you won the mover and the portraits are unbelievable.

They are very powerful.

These guys come off as a cool and confident.

Barbara: They were.

That was their character.

Rafael: And they are almost like from the 19th century or the early 20th century rather than the 1980's like the fish market itself is.

Is there one back story from one of these guys like Mikey the watchman or Vinny who looks like a young Paul Newman?

Barbara: Yes.

Something flashed right in front of me.

When I first started doing this project, I would go around and give the workers that I photographed, I remember one morning I went into the tin building.

I was going to give this photograph, my eight by 10 to this guy called Jimmy red.

He wasn't at the stand.

One of the workers says, "he ain't here no more, Barbara.

He's gone."

What does that mean?

He was murdered the night before.

That's the story.

Rafael: Wow.

There must be a bunch of them.

I wish we had time for all of them.

The pictures are so powerful, people should really look at this book.

Let's move on to part two.

There's no particular place that dominates your photographs of the 1990's like the Fulton Fish market dominated the 80's.

What is a theme that you think unites the photographs you collect in the second set?

Barbara: Carl Weiss Grove of the downtown alliance characterized lower Manhattan in the 90's as a place of uncertainty and decay.

So looking at a lot of my images that were personal to me, his point of view fit right in with the kind of photographs I was taking.

For example, walking around the Bowery, seeing places where they sold restaurant supplies and meat slicer shops, all of these warehouses that were condemned, that mysterious fires broke out in.

That is the glue, the uncertainty, a clock that never moved in time, security guards walking around in a fog with nobody there.

As a visual artist, it's important, I think good photographers use images as a metaphor for something else.

Rafael: Something I didn't know that you write about in the books is that there were a lot of suspicious fires set at lower Manhattan in the 1990's kind of like happen in the Bronx in the 1970's, by the landlords themselves, but we are not going to claim that because we don't know.

The fact of the matter is some of the photographs, those are terrible things, but they are beautiful.

There's one that I'm thinking of where you see the twin towers in the background and the smoke is coming up like a fog.

It's beautiful.

I feel guilty for thinking this terrible fire is beautiful.

Should I feel guilty?

Barbara: No.

Because we find beauty in everything.

All you have to do is look, and really look.

That particular fire was in 1996.

That was the Arson supposedly at the tin building, the old fish market.

That fire was so huge that it enveloped the whole of lower Manhattan.

So what I did, I was home that day, I used to do a lot of darkroom work.

I ran up on the bridge and photographed it against the World Trade Center, not knowing that a few years later, you know.

Rafael: So let's go to part three.

Part three contains images of the new millennium.

I assumed it would be dominated by 9/11 and the aftermath, but isn't.

Even though you have terrific pictures of 9/11 and the aftermath.

So what do you think does tithe the photographs in this section?

Barbara: That's a very good question.

I thought about this.

That's why I put the Jane Jacobs's in the beginning.

-- Jane Jacobs statement in the beginning.

What does it mean for a metropolis like New York or parts of it to go under?

How do you come back?

Some of the photographs I chose were very timely, including this interview with a woman who was very intimate with some of these mafia guys and their relationship to Rudolph Giuliani.

What ties it together for me is the coming back and the sad, ill placed conspiracy theories and demonstrations.

No, we don't want the most limb building next to where the World Trade Center once stood -- Muslim building next to where the world traitor once stood.

All of these, in spite of challenges point to a new rebirth.

In that new rebirth of the building boom and real estate, it is up to the viewer to decide what we lost Lane what will continue to endure.

Rafael: You do have a number of 9/11 related photographs.

There is one that you captured the moment where the second plane hit and there's one the day after that you called a glimpse of hell, 9:12 of night.

You also have photographs of Superstorm Sandy just before and the aftermath.

You go back to the Fulton Fish market in 2005, in fact the day before the fish market was moved to the Bronx.

How was that for you personally?

Barbara: It was like the whole experience for me to watch this cyclical thing about life and business and so much vitality, and then to see it become a shell of itself, including the photographs in 20 of the disintegration of the market building.

It is she experienced -- Shakespearean.

It is tragic.

For me, I felt like, I just learned so much from these men.

If you go up to the Bronx, a lot of the old-timers, the ones I worked with, either they passed, they are still remaining in jail , but some of them wanted to leave.

Others really missed it.

Rafael: Those photos have kind of an Edward Hopper kind of sadness.

Barbara: He's one of my heroes.

Rafael: We have less than a minute, so as brief as you can make it, I want to ask the final question which is what did the passage of time captor -- capture and all these photos?

What did they reveal to you that perhaps you did not know before about change and time was Mark we've got about 40 seconds.

Barbara: The whole point of the book is that it's almost like a rhetorical thing.

It's up to us what we save, what we preserve, what we let go of.

I'm just a vessel.

All I do is present the pictures .

It is up to the viewer to think long and hard.

Rafael: I tell you, that's what it does.

When you look at this book.

"A falling off place, the transformation of lower Manhattan."

Thank you for coming Barbara.

Barbara: It was an absolute pleasure.

And have me back, I have more to say.