Broadway Reflections New York City Abstract Photography

Distorted Theatre Signs Across a Mirrored Manhattan Facade

At first glance, the building almost disappears. What held me here was the way its mirrored facade turned Broadway into something fluid, breaking the street into bands of colour, stretched faces, fragments of advertising and distorted architecture.

I photographed this in New York City in 2011. Rather than showing Broadway directly, I concentrated on what the glass was doing to it. The reflections bend across the individual panels, changing shape each time they cross a seam. Faces from theatrical advertisements stretch and repeat. Reds, yellows and blues run into one another. Even recognizable pieces of the street become difficult to place.

That uncertainty is what makes the photograph work for me. It sits somewhere between city photography and abstraction. I know I am looking at Manhattan, but the familiar details have been rearranged by the surface of the building into something much less literal.

The strongest part of the image is the colour. Broadway already has an extraordinary visual density, and here the mirrored exterior compresses much of that energy into a single frame. Nothing stays perfectly straight. Lines tilt, faces distort and blocks of colour seem to move through the photograph.

I have always been drawn to scenes where ordinary architecture unexpectedly changes what I see. In this case, the building was not simply reflecting New York. It was reshaping it.

© Dan Kosmayer, 2011