Split personality of the Metropolis

The diversity of the city is intense. At the same time it is cloaked in calm, meditative serenity, it can also take on a chaotic, boisterous frenzy. It is always filled with high energy, sometimes to the point of over-powering.

This past week I tried to capture two opposite extremes of the Metropolis -- its sophisticated side and its wild side. Both are night time views made up of multiple exposures. The top image, called Dressed for the evening,  is the minimalism of the city grid reflected in its architecture and lighting. The bottom image, called Boogie-Woogie too, is Times Square and Broadway lights at night. This image pay homage to Piet Mondrian who moved to New York to escape the second world war. He loved the "dynamic rhythm" of the city, which he liked to "Boogy-Woogie" jazz popular at the time, and tried to capture this spirit in an abstract painting finished in 1943 and entitled Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Using purely abstract forms, Mondrian sought to convey an order he saw underpinning the natural world. I have used found grid patterns of the city architecture to similarly tie together my compositions of the Metropolis series of photographs.

Metropolis - Dressed for the evening, NY, 2015

Metropolis - Boogie-Woogie too, NY, 2015

Because I intend to print these images quite large I have taken to photographing them with the 42mp Sony A7RII  equipped with high quality, usually Leica or Zeiss, lenses.