A Winter in the Fruit

December 2023. I had been on a university exchange in Montreal for a few months. I took a bus from Berri-UQAM station to New York, twelve hours on the road. I had loaded the Rollei 35 with Kodak Gold 400 before getting on. No shooting plan. Just the idea that New York deserved to be looked at as a perspective error: too large, too vertical, too well-known to be actually seen.

Kodak Gold 400 in winter is a decision. This film prefers warmth: skin tones, interior lights, sunsets. Under the grazing December sun on Manhattan, it does something unexpected with grey stone and metal. Cast shadows become geometric constructions. Taxi yellows turn orange. The city takes on a 1970s film hue I hadn't planned for.

I spent four days walking. From the bottom of the High Line to Central Park, from the 34th Street subway to the Hudson piers. The Empire State, I photographed it from the street, low angle, without looking for the panoramic viewpoint. It was there at the end of an avenue, like an overwhelming given. I had no choice but to raise the lens.

Looking at the contact sheets in Paris, the series organized itself around a tension: the city as mass and the city as refuge. King of Midtown and Midnight City on one side, vertical mass and night reflection. Quiet Central and Colors of December on the other, the park as breathing room, people inside reading or walking without looking up at the skyscrapers. New York is only bearable because it contains Central Park.