Am frühen Morgen, wenn die Hektik der Stadt noch nicht erwacht ist und die Menschen noch ihren Träumen nachhängen, dann zieht der Fotograf Christopher Thomas mit seiner Kamera durch New York. Die Stadt gehört ihm und er entlockt ihr all das Schöne, das der Stille entstammt. Seine Fotografien zeigen das andere New York: Die Metropole als einen Ort, an dem die Plätze und Monumente nur sich selbst gehören. Fifth Avenue, Flatiron Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park - es sind nicht die verborgenen Winkel, sondern die großartigen Landmarks der modernen Architektur, die Thomas in atemberaubenden Ansichten, beinahe unwirklich und doch ohne digitale Manipulation einfängt: im Nebel, unter Herbstlaub oder unberührter Schneedecke, fotografiert in Schwarzweiß-Polaroid. Dieser Fotoband ist eine hinreißende Hommage an die stille Poesie New Yorks.

Christopher Thomas, 1961 in München geboren, Absolvent der Bayerischen Staatslehranstalt für Photographie, arbeitet weltweit als renommierter Werbephotograph. Seine Photoreportagen für Geo, Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Merian und andere Zeitschriften wurden vielfach international ausgezeichnet. Als Künstler bekannt geworden ist er mit dem Zyklus Münchner Elegien (2005). Seine Serien New York Sleeps (2008) Passion (2010), Venedig. Die Unsichtbare (2012), Paris im Licht (2014) und Female (2016) wurden in zahlreichen Galerien und Museen ausgestellt. Christopher Thomas lebt und arbeitet in München.

This is New York! Or are they dream worlds, chimeras, inventions, or perhaps testimony to a past era? Viewers are astonished, recognizing the places and getting lost in memories. A city of silence, beyond the turbulence of everyday life, a metropolis with no people, as if a spell had been cast on it: Grand Central Station, Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron Building, Katz's Restaurant, the Brooklyn Bridge - familiar, but never seen this way before. When we unsuspectingly removed these photographs from a drawer in his studio - seven views, all taken in 2001 (before September 11), softly sketched as a result of long exposure times, printed on deckle-edge paper with the streaky border of a Polaroid-we urged the photographer to return to New York, where he had lived now and again over an extended period, in order to continue the series. Over two more years, including stays in each of the seasons, he produced a portfolio of photographs, of which the present volume presents a selection of nearly eighty works. With his clear idea of shooting techniques, composition, light, formats, and his dispensing with color, the exquisite printing in rich, subtle tonality, and the form of the images' presentation - handmade paper, passe-partout, frame - Christopher Thomas picks up on classical traditions. As a renowned photographer of a glamorous world of products, he has access to all advanced technological possibilities. However, as an artist, he places his faith in the power of the image. His photographs seem classical, from another time. Before dawn, when the city is asleep, Thomas sets out in the twilight with his large-format camera - a field camera built for him by Linhof - which forces him to move slowly, as well as a tripod, a black cloth, and black-and-white Polaroid film. It is as if he were taking himself outside of time. As if, at this moment when night borders day, he could uncover the essence of the city, erasing the profane and quotidian in favor of the "eternal" or timeless. He approaches his motif with a documentary intention and at the same time establishes the aesthetic of the painterly Romantic. He concentrates on the real, focuses attention on the object, and yet a hint of "another" world becomes tangible. Like idealized landscapes in the Romantic tradition, his photographs have a poetic sensuality, contemplative power, and an emotional aura; they evoke sensations such as admiration, delight, aesthetic pleasure: the parks and piers, the Hudson River and Coney Island, the cemeteries and bridges, the Statue of Liberty, in the early morning fog, beneath autumn leaves, schemas in the mists, pristine blankets of snow, silvery skies, gleaming surfaces of water, squares, and monuments - all without any traces of flaneurs or residents. Hidden away in the beauty that derives from silence are melancholy and fear of loss. The perfect always bears its own inherent risk, and the stasis of time includes change. What may nostalgically seduce our eyes as a "souvenir," a memory, also evokes as an alternative vision the racing speed, the inhumane, and the wounds of the city. We are very pleased that two outstanding connoisseurs of classical and contemporary photography have written essays for this publication: Ulrich Pohlmann, who has been director of the Fotomuseum München for many years where he exhibited Christopher Thomas' cycle Münchner Elegien (Munich Elegies) in 2005, and Bob Shamis, himself a photographer as well as curator for photography, for many years at the Museum of the City of New York. Bob Shamis offers "an impressionistic discussion" of Christopher Thomas' work, and, having looked at thousands of photographs of New York, he appreciates their uniqueness. Pohlmann outlines Thomas' "European view," his romantic (re)construction of the City," and his "homage to the beauty of urban architecture" in the context of historical connections. Quoting sources that range from Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Alvin Langdon Cobu Leseprobe

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