Elizabeth Felicella, a widely published architectural photographer whose meticulous and lyrical images chronicled the civic life of New York and beyond, died last December at her home in Manhattan. She was 58. A memorial took place April 29 at the Center for Architecture in New York City.
The cause was leukemia, according to her longtime partner, George Stolz.
Known for both her commissioned and independent work, Felicella’s photography appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Places Journal, and Vogue, as well as in many architecture and design publications. But beyond magazine spreads, she was an artist and visual thinker deeply committed to documenting the civic fabric of cities — the parks, libraries, and liminal spaces that form the backdrop of everyday life.
“Elizabeth Felicella was an artist-intellectual in the deepest sense — photographer, curator, writer, activist,” said architectural historian Reinhold Martin, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. “Her subtle understanding of architecture, landscape, and image as both idea and experience courses through every aspect of her life’s work.”
Felicella’s most celebrated independent project, Reading Room: A Catalog of New York City’s Branch Libraries (2008–2013), captured all 210 branch libraries across the five boroughs. Using a 4×5 large-format camera, she spent five years photographing the exteriors and interiors of each building — from stately Carnegie-era constructions to modest midcentury modernist sites — often before opening hours. Her photographs documented not just architecture, but lived detail: desks, graffiti, pencil sharpeners, and waiting patrons.
“I took license to shoot in long and short sentences,” she once said, borrowing metaphors from reading and writing to describe her visual method. “No shot list was applied: I photographed what struck me.” Reading Room was exhibited at the New York Public Library, the Center for Architecture, and featured in The New Yorker. The project, with text by Stolz, was also published as a book.
Though trained in the formal techniques of architectural photography — precision lighting, carefully controlled perspectives — Felicella infused her work with a documentarian’s curiosity and an activist’s eye.
Born in 1966 on Long Island and raised in Old Greenwich, Conn., Elizabeth Felicella was the daughter of Joan and Vincent Felicella. After graduating from Bard College in 1989, she pursued graduate studies in German literature at Columbia before transferring to the Fine Arts program, where she studied under artist Judy Pfaff and created large-scale sculptures exploring spatial relationships. A Fulbright grant took her to Berlin in the 1990s, where she studied at the Hochschule der Künste and immersed herself in the city’s post-reunification architectural debates. That interdisciplinary environment shaped her intellectual and visual practice.
Upon returning to New York, Felicella apprenticed with the noted photographer Paul Warchol before launching her own studio. Her breakthrough came through early commissions with architecture publications, and long-term collaborations with firms like Architecture Research Office (ARO), Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and Matthews Nielsen. “We are devastated by the loss of our dear friend and collaborator,” says Stephen Cassell, FAIA, principal at ARO. “Over twenty years of photographing our projects, from New Orleans to Paris, she brought her art and deep humanity to her work. Elizabeth’s dedication was phenomenal: we remember her driving, during COVID, to Houston to capture, in a sandstorm, our work at the Rothko Chapel. She would do anything to get the shot. We cherish the time we spent with her. She will be missed.”
She became particularly admired for her landscape architectural photography. Her 20-year documentation of Brooklyn Bridge Park, from derelict docks to vibrant waterfront, is now considered one of the most important visual archives of the park’s development.
Michael Van Valkenburgh, the landscape architect and educator, recalls his collaboration with Felicella, when about 20 years ago he asked a noted photographer to shoot a project of his, and the photographer told Van Valkenburgh that he was too busy and suggested hiring his assistant, Elizabeth Felicella, instead. “This introduction began a two-decade partnership in which Elizabeth visited our work and helped us see it through her eyes,” recalls Van Valkenburgh, who recounted to ARCHITECT a few memorable moments. “She came to photograph the Monk's Garden in Boston the same day the photographer Bill Cunningham was there doing a shoot for The New York Times, and it was pure joy to witness them working individually and together. Elizabeth had also photographed the site of Brooklyn Bridge Park before the old warehouses were torn down, and she returned just a few years ago to capture the park again — many of the shots from the same perspective. The pairs are beautiful, but their genius comes from Elizabeth's ability to see a place in its essence. It comes not through an agenda she brought, but from a truth she could always uncover. With her passing, a beautiful era of celebrating the visual world together has ended.”
Felicella’s independent projects frequently explored peripheral or overlooked landscapes. Idlewild: An Atlas documented the edges of JFK Airport, drawing attention to spaces shaped by — yet left out of — narratives of urban progress. “She sought to remap the city more equitably,” said friend and photographer Meredith Heuer, “to ennoble its marginalized spaces.”
Heuer first met Elizabeth in the mid-nineties. “She had just begun to work on her JFK project and I remember driving around the neighborhoods near the airport with her on a particularly cold, grey January day and being honestly totally baffled about what we were looking for, but Elizabeth knew,” she says. “Though very few of her photos contain people, people were essential to every image she made. It was important to her to represent spaces and places in a way that reflected the human experience. She had a subtle eye and a tender heart that was uniquely capable of taking a photo with just enough compassion and nostalgia to lead the viewer to connect to past and future occupants of her subjects.”
Heuer also says that Felicella was an artist in the truest sense of the word: “Elizabeth was not motivated by commerce but by a deep conviction that photographs have the power to make meaning and create connections,” says Heuer. “While she took countless beautiful photographs worthy of note as individual images, her real strength and passion was in creating collections of photos that explored ideas around our urban experience. This all sounds a bit dry, but her photos were anything but.”
Other projects included Sea Level (2015), a panoramic visual map of both sides of the East River; Uneasy Spaces, an exploration of New York’s security infrastructure; and Picturing Investment, an unfinished effort to catalog WPA-era infrastructure across New York State. Her most recent institutional collaborations were with the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives, resulting in two monographs: Uncrating the Japanese House (2013) and Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect (2023).
Felicella collaborated with curator Molly Lester on the exhibition and book, Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect (Yale University Press, 2023), the first comprehensive study of the pioneering 19th-century architect, who was the first American woman to practice architecture independently, without male partners or family ties. The book featured newly commissioned photographs by Felicella that illuminated Nichols’s quietly radical integration of domestic functionality, social purpose, and aesthetic refinement.
Molly Lester explained that Felicella’s collaboration impacted the curator’s own perspective on Nichols. “In order to compose any of her photographs, Elizabeth dug into the archive and wanted to talk through what was original to Minerva Parker Nichols' designs, what details and spaces reflected her design sensibilities,” says Lester. “The experience of working with Elizabeth to determine each composition at each site really challenged some of my assumptions about Nichols' approach and illuminated certain patterns across her body of work.”
Outside of her professional work, Felicella was a passionate surfer, martial artist, and political activist. A regular presence at Rockaway Beach, she also documented the high-rise housing and social life of that community, even distributing cameras to local children to photograph their own environments. She was deeply involved in local political organizing and a committed member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Friends recall her as a generous host and collector, particularly drawn to the practical beauty of midcentury East German ceramics. “She loved using those pieces — modest, anonymous design objects from a socialist state — to entertain friends in her apartment,” said one.
At the time of her passing, Felicella was pursuing a Ph.D. at the City University of New York focused on preservationist photographer Richard Nickel. She is survived by her mother, Joan Felicella; her siblings, Carol Miller Felicella, Vincent Felicella, and Jill Felicella; and her partner, George Stolz.
Elizabeth Felicella’s work remains a lasting testament to the social life of architecture — not just the buildings we design, but the lives that pass through them.
