Jan Staller is an American photographer. He was born in 1952 and moved to Manhattan in 1976. For decades he has photographed the west side of Manhattan and the wider New York area, including industrial sites and construction sites.
His books include Frontier New York (Hudson Hills Press, 1988) and On Planet Earth (Aperture, 1997). Manhattan Project (5 Continents Editions, 2025, 120 pages) began in 2013, when a building went up across from his home. It shows construction materials lifted by cranes, such as crane hooks and steel plates, isolated against the sky. He photographed them handheld with a DSLR and a telephoto lens. The book has a preface by Neil deGrasse Tyson and an essay by Brett Littman.
His photographs have been exhibited at MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art. They are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hasselblad Corporation.
