New York City Architecture | Black and White Photography

Layers of Manhattan Architecture Rising Through the City

New York can become almost abstract when I stop looking at individual buildings and concentrate on how they fit together.

In this photograph, I compressed a dense section of Manhattan into a series of vertical layers. Tall office buildings crowd against one another, windows repeat in rigid grids, sunlight cuts across some facades while others disappear almost completely into shadow. Through a narrow opening between the towers, another ornate building appears in the distance.

That small glimpse is one of my favorite parts of the photograph.

There is no traditional skyline here and very little sky. Instead, I wanted the architecture itself to fill the frame. The buildings overlap, interrupt and partially conceal one another, creating the visual density that I associate so strongly with New York City.

Black and white makes those relationships even stronger. Color would separate the individual buildings; monochrome pulls them together and emphasizes geometry, contrast and repetition. Bright stone sits beside almost black facades, while hundreds of windows create patterns across the photograph.

I have always enjoyed looking for these compressed views in Manhattan. New York is so frequently photographed through its famous landmarks that it can be easy to overlook the extraordinary architecture packed between them.

For me, this photograph isn't really about identifying a particular skyscraper. It is about the experience of looking into Manhattan and seeing buildings stacked visually one behind another—an enormous city reduced to light, shadow, windows and vertical lines.

© Dan Kosmayer, 2015