Laundromats are a quintessential part of the New York City landscape: an indispensible element to many city dwellers' lives, they're an ersatz utility room shared with dozens of strangers at any given time, a moist environment of humming machines and strange clothes. No other public facility gathers so many people under one roof to engage in one of the most intimate rituals in which the modern human routinely performs, that of making clean again one's outer and under garments. What New Yorker has never experienced the dread of removing another's...stuff...from a dryer having completed its cycle in order to get on with it and be released from the temporary prison of chore.... Laundromats are as varied as the people inside. They often reflect the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the neighborhood they reside in (announcements, flags, and symbols displayed often reveal something about their mainly mom-and-pop owners), yet they additionally possess a story of commercial storefront design, inspired and mundane: the trend date of awning design and lettering; the poster advertising for cleaning; the refreshment options for adults and their charges. Neighborhood laundromats are one of the last holdouts of the disappearing storefronts of New York City as small shops are driven out of business by chains and venture-capital initiatives. Like the beloved Korean green grocer/bodega/Arab deli, someday soon there could be far fewer of these ugly ducklings, and another genuine element of New York's street life will be...washed away. Laundromat  was photographed from 2008 to 2012 and represents all five New York boroughs and most of its neighborhoods. "There’s a deadpan brilliance to this volume...This book makes you want to, even if you are lucky enough to have a washer and dryer at home, pull the lint from your eyes and pop into your local laundromat to do a load." - Dwight Garner , New York Times "The Snorri Bros...decided to focus their lens on these almost ubiquitous storefronts in their new book, Laundromat before more of the small, mom-and-pop shops begin to disappear from the city's blocks." -Huffington Post Snorri Sturluson is an Icelandic director and photographer. He is best known for his work as a member of the directing / photography collective Snorri Bros. Snorri has lived in New York since 2001 and as part of the Snorri Bros. helmed numerous high profile advertising campaigns for TV, print, and Internet for many of the world’s best known brands as well as directing music videos and other content for various purposes. Along with being a professional image-maker and storyteller in the commercial world Snorri is developing several feature film scripts. Laundromat is the third book of photographs under the Snorri Bros. moniker but it is the first one consisting solely of photographs by Snorri Sturluson. D. Foy 's work has appeared in Post Road , The Literary Review , The Georgia Review , Berkeley Fiction Review , and Quick Fiction , to name a few. His story, "Barnacles of the Fuzz," recently made it to the pages of Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial , edited by Cal Morgan, and essays are forthcoming in Frequencies and BOMB . His novel, Made to Break , is due out from Two Dollar Radio in February 2014. He lives in Brooklyn. All Washed Up: The American Laundromat   “New York City has 2,654 laundries—self-service ones like Clean Rite and dry cleaners who take in bags for fluff ’n’ fold. That is one for every 3,151 people.”— N. R. Kleinfield   Until Snorri Sturluson immigrated to New York City in early 2001, when he was 31, the few Laundromats  he’d seen were those encountered as a young man traveling through Europe. To the American this might seem unbelievable, but in Sturluson’s home town of Reykjavík, Iceland, laundromats didn’t exist. Though they can be found in England, where they’re better known as “laundrettes,” and a clutch of random cities such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Paris, where they’re just a bit more common than the platypus, laundromats are principally an American phenomenon, invented by Americans for Americans, risen to prominence in the atomic boom that followed World War II, when America was at once consolidating its power and expanding its reach.   Despite its relative obscurity outside America, however, and despite its decidedly squalid complexion, the laundromat has held a curiously elevated status among the panoply of Americana erected in the collective European consciousness. This, of course, isn’t to say the laundromat isn’t equally fascinating to Americans. Scenes in at least 38 films made since 1980 feature laundromats, and a few before, many of them cult classics, if not masterpieces. From The Trip and Midnight Cowboy , to My Beautiful Laundrette , Rain Man , Paris, Texas , and Wings of Desire , to Color Me Kubrick , In the Valley of Elah , and such lowbrow stuff as My Bloody Valentine and Ninja Assassin , the laundromat has