Description
The photograph is taken from a height, above a neighbourhood of brick, workshops and warehouses where the streets cross at right angles. Here, the city stays low: tarred roofs, solar panels, water towers on stilts, walls painted with immense advertising murals that stand in for monuments. And then, far in the distance, beneath a blue sky scattered with small clouds, Manhattan raises its wall of towers — present and remote at once, like a stage set placed on the horizon. It is the whole New York paradox that the image lays flat: the vertical metropolis we know by heart and, at its feet, the horizontal expanse of the neighbourhoods that look on. The colour renders the contrast between the russet brick of the foreground and the blued greys of the distance — between the city that works and the city that puts itself on show.
