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NEW YORK NOTEBOOK
Photographs by Francois Bernadi
“I loved New York, with that powerful love that at times leaves you full of uncertainty and abhorrence: there are times when one needs an exile.” Albert Camus “Rains of New York,” 1947
My first contact with New York happened at 2 am. Coming out of the subway at Times Square the sight of the sidewalks made me shiver. A shiver of well being.
There were not many people around but I could feel the buzz. In front of these vast deserted sidewalks, I immediately understood the power of this city.
Then I raised my head and realize we were surrounded by a giant forest of cement, glass and metal, some strange and dark canyons. But first there were these immense, generous sidewalks, made for street life. Made to stroll, to go. In the flow of people that will passing over them, strangers eyes will meet, arms and shoulders will rub against each other in constant discovery.
Later I wondered, how can you spend your life on a cross road ?
Just like a moth to a street light. The projectors are in place, engine on and soars. Nothing behind. Action!
I could go on forever about the city. I’d rather let my pictures and a few sensitive people do the talking…
Ah, filthy New York New York,
New York of cables and death.
What angel do you carry concealed in your cheek?
What ineffable voice will speak the truth of the wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of you tainted anemones?
Federico García Lorca “a poet in New York”, 1930
The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It is unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Unintentional beauty. Beauty by mistake.
Milan Kundera “The unbearable lightness of being”, 1984
I didn’t know that, for the newly arrived European, there was a “New York sickness”, like sea-sickness, air-sickness and mountain-sickness.
New York is a colonial city, an outpost. All the hospitality and cruelty of Nature are present in this city, the most prodigious monument man has ever erected to himself.
A wild sky over parallel rails, that more than anything else is New York.
You never lose your way in New York. But this spacial precision is not accompanied by any precision of feeling. In the numerical anonymity of the streets and avenues, I am simply anybody, anywhere. You never lose your way and you are always lost. And suddenly I think that New York is about to acquire a history and that it already possesses its ruins.
Jean Paul Sartre
The beauty of New York has to do not with its being a town, but with the fact that it transposes the town to the level of an artificial landscape, the only significant values being the rich velvety quality of the light, the sharpness of distant outlines, the awe-inspiring precipices between the skyscrapers and the somber valleys, dotted with multicolored cars looking like flowers.
Claude Levi-Strauss
We enter New York harbor. A terrific sight despite or because of the mist. The order, the strength, the economic power are there. The heart trembles in front of so much admirable inhumanity.
Odor of New York a perfume of iron and cement in lower Manhattan, an immense geological dig between skyscrapers which stand very close to one another; we advance, overwhelmed by a feeling of something prehistoric.
Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
Rain on New York. It flows untiringly between the high cement cubes. Bizarre feeling of remoteness. Impression of being trapped in this city, that I could escape from the monoliths that surround me and run for hours without finding anything but new cement prisons, without the hope of a hill, a real tree, or a bewildered face.
