Residues of a Dream World The High Line, 2011 Michael Cataldi, David Kelley, Hans Kuzmich, Jens Maier-Rothe and Jeannine Tang Abstract The High Line – a public park on a repurposed railway track in New Y ork City – first opened to the public in 2009, and has been increasingly celebrated as a model public space, and as a democratic project directed by community. Artistic and amateur photographic practices have significantly informed the High Line’s design, landscaping, publicity, urban policy, use and constel- lations of community. This photo-conceptual essay critically considers the con- stitutive function of the photographic image, as photography produces, interpellates and defines the public and public sphere of the High Line. However, these imaging practices have also taken increasingly regulated form, and endorse conservative forms of community, personhood and public- ness. The new park’s imaging practices may be understood as supplementary to neoliberal forms of property accumulation, in fact diminishing public space even as they purport to represent it. Drawing from the historical avant-garde, feminist critiques of representation and anti-capitalist urban theory, the fol- lowing photographic series critiques the High Line’s photographic apparatus, from within a practice of photography, and from a position within the field of contemporary art. Key words contemporary art j democracy j feminism j gentrification j landscape j modernity j neoliberalism j photography j public park j public sphere j queer j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 28(7- 8): 358^389 DOI: 10.1177/0263276411425834