Staten Island, the least well known of New York City's boroughs, could be the lost island of Atlantis. This contemporary geography evokes that of the mythical past, to the extent that the "realness" of the present becomes inseparable from the predetermined course of the myth. To walk Staten Island is to hold a novel whose last page we've already read. Its seductions, banalities, and idiosyncrasies, taken in allegorical terms, bespeak a tale we've long known. The narrative is cursed with an awareness of the inevitable and no scene is without a double meaning.

If Staten Island is doomed to the same fate as Atlantis, it is less out of greed for money or power than an unrelenting urge to preserve a precious way of life. This insularity staves off change but also guarantees a slow, creeping death that lacks even the drama of the end of the Greek Eden. No violent earthquakes or tidal waves will pull this New York borough to the depths of the sea; its main foe is obsolescence.

The photographs of Atlantis occur during this attenuated process, in the Moment Before the Moment Before Civilization's End. Communication stutters, as mailboxes, pay phones, and satellite dishes become modern relics. Vestiges of success and celebration find fatigued form in limp plastic flags and flaccid bags of recycling. Nature, our last solace, promises little, as scrubby woods and remote waters hold out little hope at all.