I recently stumbled across a series of photographs by Munich-based photographer Christopher Thomas, the one body of work I liked the most was New York City. Thomas looks at contemporary photos of cities, he longs to see the landscape without city traffic. “I miss the pureness of images from 100 years ago, where you could see the architecture without cars and pedestrians,” he says.
So when he first took an apartment in New York in 2000, where he would live part-time for 10 years, he decided to try to capture the city without the traffic, using extremely long exposures on Polaroid Type 55 film in his Linhof 4x5 camera. Many times, he shot during snowfall to help blur out pedestrian traffic. He took up the project in earnest in 2007, and the haunting and melancholic series, “New York Sleeps,” was shown at the Stephen Kasher gallery in 2009.
Check out his photo gallery, I love this old school take on city photography.
