New York City Skyscrapers | Black and White Architecture Photography

Manhattan Skyscrapers Reduced to Geometry, Light and Shadow

Sometimes New York is most interesting when I stop trying to photograph the whole skyline.

I made this photograph from high above Manhattan, isolating a tightly compressed group of skyscrapers rather than showing the city around them. From this perspective, the buildings begin to lose their individual identities. They become an arrangement of vertical lines, repeating windows, curved forms and hard geometric edges.

That abstraction is what interested me.

The central building immediately separates itself from the surrounding towers. Its stepped architecture and curved facade contrast with the severe vertical grids behind it, while the arched structure across the rooftop introduces another unexpected pattern. Everything feels incredibly dense. One building seems to push against the next, with almost no breathing room between them.

I chose black and white because color wasn't important to what I was seeing. This photograph is about architecture and structure—the way sunlight strikes one facade while the neighboring building falls into deep shadow, the repetition of hundreds of windows, and the enormous scale created by stacking all those architectural elements together.

New York gives me endless opportunities to photograph famous buildings, but I'm often more interested in fragments of the city. A different viewpoint can turn familiar architecture into something much less obvious.

Here, Manhattan becomes almost a study in design.

There are no streets, people or recognizable pieces of the skyline to establish scale. Just skyscrapers packed together, rising through the frame, and the remarkable visual complexity of a city built vertically.

© Dan Kosmayer, 2015