"NYC 2002_08_22/23"

Portfolio

pigmentbased inkjet prints bound in portfolio

titled, dated and signed with dedication

The photographic work NYC 2002_08_22/23 was photographed in the Austrian New York studio on 17^th Street at 8^th Avenue during my fellowship residency in . The thirty individual photographs exposed during the night of August 22/23, 2002 (each of the negatives was exposed for about six minutes), now combine to create a panoramic view of New York City. The camera location was in the middle of Manhattan West (Chelsea) on a balcony on the 20th floor of the building facing east, and photographs were taken between about 10:30 and 3:30 pm. Thus, the light in these photos comes exclusively from the lights in the streets, which was diffusely reflected and amplified in the summer nighttime haze over the city. The choice of a negative film sensitized to daylight created a color scheme iconographically more associable with sequences from science fiction films, through which New York City could be more believably located on an alien planet than would be the case, for example, with a midnight blue sky normally usable in brochures. Through digitization, the individual frames could be color-matched to their corresponding neighboring images, and only through specific image processing could as many of the tonal values inherent in the negatives as possible be made visible in the print version now available.
Starting from my first panorama work Das Tor (1992), which was based on a three-dimensional splitting and the thematization of the concept of continuity in photography, and the photographic work Dobrac, realized in 2001/2002, which pursued & realized a two-dimensional fragmentation of an "illusionistic" overall view of the photographic object "mountain", this work arose from the fascination with this breathtaking view from the studio on the 20th floor on 17th Street. The illusion of the totality is maintained despite perspective tilts of the individual frames and strengthens through its fractures the relationship illusion - object - viewer: the fractures in the perception of the whole are defined by the perception of the details and at the same time upset.
(Wolfgang Reichmann)