ABOUT

The photographs Raymond Depardon made in New York, over the winter of 1980, seem on first sight an anomaly within his wider work. The compositions are unusually chaotic, the focus somewhat haphazard, the lighting unpredictable. They convey a degree of the moodiness, closeness, bustle, and at times the seamy-ness of the midwinter streets of the city. It is only with the photographer’s own explanation of the context and mode of creating the work – only made public upon the printing of the Steidl photobook, Manhattan Out, in 2008 – that these puzzles start to be resolved.