On a recent afternoon, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz stood in the Hallett Nature Sanctuary in Central Park contemplating the ruin of a dead tree, which he had watched a woodpecker steadily diminish over months. In the course of his project to photograph 40 New York City parks for the Department of Parks & Recreation, Mr. Meyerowitz has spent a lot of time considering the biological rhythms of decay and renewal, as well as the juxtaposition of pockets of untamed nature within the concrete world of the city.

The parks project is both a dramatic counterpoint and a natural sequel to Mr. Meyerowitz’s previous project, published as “Aftermath,” in which he documented the recovery and clean-up efforts at ground zero.

“I’m coming to an age where I think more and more my work should be utilitarian and not just self-fulfilling,” Mr. Meyerowitz said in an interview. The idea for the parks project came from Mr. Meyerowitz’s friend, the Parks & Recreation commissioner, Adrian Benepe. It will be the first photo archive of the parks created since the 1930’s, when the Works Progress Administration hired photographers to document the development under Robert Moses.

When Mr. Benepe asked Mr. Meyerowitz to create the archive, the Parks Department had no money to fund it. Mr. Meyerowitz himself secured a $370,00 grant from Hewlett-Packard, whose large-format inkjet printers he is using to make his prints. In order to raise the rest of the money for the project (another $420,000), and interest a museum in mounting an exhibition and a publisher in doing a book, Mr. Meyerowitz and Mr. Benepe have put together an exhibition of the work-in-progress at the Edwynn Houk Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition is open to the public, and it offers a tantalizing taste of what the complete archive will represent.

The photographs show the incredible range of landscapes in New York City, from a rocky outcropping in the Bronx that looks like a piece of the Maine coast to a forest in Staten Island that could be a swamp in the Deep South. Mr. Meyerowitz said the places that, either through intent or neglect, have been allowed run wild “carry with them the fragrance of the past. It’s where the great Adirondack forest that once covered all of New York has its last, vestigial remains.”

Part of the reason for making this archive now, Mr. Benepe explained, is that some parks that are now running wild may be tamed in the near future. “We’re in the midst of the greatest period of park expansion and rebuilding since the 1930s,” Mr. Benepe said. The city has budgeted $2.7 billion both to rebuild parks and to construct new ones, including the future Brooklyn Bridge Park on the Brooklyn waterfront, the Hudson River Park along the West Side of Manhattan, and the 2,000-acre park to be constructed on the Fresh Kills landfill.

Mr. Meyerowitz has taken around 1,500 photographs, of what will eventually be between 3,000 and 5,000. For each photograph, he records the name of the park, the date, and the GPS location. When the Parks Department puts the photo archive online, people will be able to zoom in on a location in a New York City park and see a picture of that spot.

One afternoon last week, he took a reporter and another photographer on a tour of the jungle-like trails of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, a four-acre promontory at the southern end of Central Park that is surrounded on three sides by the Pond. In 1934, it was turned into a bird sanctuary and closed to the public. Mr. Meyerowitz, who lives a few blocks away, has a key to the Hallett and has gone in to photograph around three times a week for the last year.

One thing he likes about the Hallett, Mr. Meyerowitz said, is that it reminds him — not physically but on a spiritual level — of a similar peninsula in Padua, where Daniel Libeskind designed a memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The memorial includes a twisted steel beam that Mr. Meyerowitz smuggled out of the World Trade Center site, which showed as part of a World Trade Center exhibition at the eighth Venice Biennale for Architecture, and was then donated to the Veneto region.

While working at the World Trade Center site, Mr. Meyerowitz was also flying frequently to Tuscany, where he was completing another project. “I found myself standing in a muddy field [in Italy] and saying, ‘Oh, yes, this is the goodness in the world, as opposed to all the things that anger and destruction and war create.'” he said. “And in a way, this [parks] project offers those contradictions, too. You leave the canyons of the city behind and suddenly you’re in a place where the birds are singing.”

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