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Dutch photographer Nicolaas Biegman distilled five years of life
in New York into one thick book of pictures, Mainly Manhattan.
Divided into loose categories--food, phones, etc.--his images capture
some of the pathos, randomness, and joy of the city.
(Photo by Nicolaas Biegman)
| A Dutch photographer tries to tell the untellable story of New
York City. by David E. Brown Nicolaas Biegman begins the introduction to his new book of photographs simply. "I compiled this composite portrait of New York... over a five-year period in a state of never-ending amazement at the urban landscape and the multicolored inhabitants." Such amazement is a common, even everyday response to the city, whether from lifelong residents or tourists or visiting Dutch photographers. But Biegman's "composite portrait," recently published as Mainly Manhattan (Goose Press, 1997), is far from ordinary. Its 233 photographs recall not only great street photography but also Whitman's poetic urge to record, to catalogue, to enumerate. The squat, brick-like book describes 17 loose groups of things and people and events in the city--subway, buildings, windows, buying and selling, street, food, dogs, kids, men, women, phones, etc.--that, in their wide-ranging specificity, read a bit like a poem. In "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman describes by parts: "Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue / Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest..." Biegman takes a similar tack; in the introduction, he lists the street food he saw--"frankfurters, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, pizzas, knishes, hot dogs, chili dogs, cheese dogs, falafel, vegetarian falafel, chicken kebab, shish kebab, kofta kebab, eggplant, hommos... donuts, buttered rolls, muffins, pretzels, soups, salads, nuts (peanuts, cashews, almonds, coconut and mixed), and ice cream washed down with coffee, hot chocolate, iced tea, sprite, snapple, juice, spring water, soda, cider, pepsi or coca-cola." The photographs unfold like this, a blur of detail that captures the casual pathos of the city. With no text or margins or other distractions past the introduction, Biegman presents an endlessly chaotic, pluralistic, realistic image of New York. Only a few of the pictures are standouts; what makes Mainly Manhattan work so well is their cumulative impact and the way they unfold. The rhythm of the images and pages is that of the street--of things noticed, things remembered only later, patterns that emerge over time. Biegman is far from the first photographer to try to capture a city. The closest predecessor to Mainly Manhattan may be W. Eugene Smith's work in Pittsburgh, which began in 1955. The celebrated photojournalist turned a modest assignment--to illustrate a history of the steel-making city--into a two-year shoot, making some 7,000 negatives in what he later called an attempt to "give a person the feeling of Pittsburgh, and the experience of the city." The project never really came to fruition; Smith edited and re-edited the pictures for years, but could never find a publisher or magazine that would (or could) publish the 2,000 images he thought of as the essay. Biegman's work in New York seems to have become almost as consuming. "With time," he writes, "I acquired the habit of never going anywhere, anytime, without my heavy old Leica." But he also learned--much earlier than Smith, it seems--that his task would never be finished, that even hundreds of photographs cannot create a true likeness of something as complex as New York. Trying to describe the tension and energy of a Rollerblader waiting for a light on lower Broadway--just a simple scene--he realized that "even after becoming inseparable from my camera, I could not take home everything I saw." |
Keywords:
urban, city, art, book
