Luminous New York

Our perception encompasses a viewing angle of roughly 90 degrees — anything wider has to rely on the short-term memory of the brain. Yet, when presented with a panoramic view, the brain is able to adapt. Concepts like left, right, front and back are not valid anymore as the viewer becomes a panoptes; suddenly being able to see everything at once.

New York City, my beloved home for many years, is one of the most light-polluted regions on this planet. Though a nightmare for astronomers, this saturation of luminosity is shear luck for photographers. Depending on the cloud cover, the sky has a beautiful blue or orange glow, and all the 9 million inhabitants have their lights on through the night. Long exposures turn the populace into ghostly shadows (or make them completely disappear) while giving rich details in otherwise underexposed areas with thousands of sources for illumination. Panoramas draw the viewer into the grand urban landscape of New York — cataloguing eerie details from pedestrians under a street lamp to a TV screen, half a mile away in a window.

Production:
To achieve those huge prints with their stunning details (sometimes referred to as gigapixel panoramas), I do rely on a technique called digital stitching. It involves taking many individual exposures with some overlap, up to 900 in some cases, and merging/blending them into one large panorama. If you have seen the works of Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, you will get an idea how detailed a huge photo can be, although both of them are shooting their photos with traditional cameras, while I rely on digital stitching, to get those "impossible" views. The photos are printed on a OCE Lightjet (digital c-print) and then face-mounted against plexi-glass (aso known as Diasec mount) and backed with a rigid substrate, in my case Dibond.

Biography

Born 1969, Oberstreu, Germany
Resides in Astoria, NY, USA

EDUCATION

1994-1999 Diplom-Kommunikationsdesigner, University for Applied Science, Würzburg, Germany

EXHIBITIONS

2008 Winter Group Show, Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark, NJ, USA
2008 Incandescent, 532 Gallery, New York, NY, USA
2008 BRiDGE as iCON Group Show, Tabla Rasa Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, USA
2008 Photographers of BWAC, Kingsborough College, Brooklyn, NY, USA
2008 BWAC Spring Group Show, Redhook, Brooklyn, NY, USA (served also as show chair)
2007 Points of View, Tabla Rasa Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, USA
2007 BWAC Fall Group Show, Redhook, Brooklyn, NY, USA (served also as show co-chair)
1996 The History of Jazz (digital illustration in collaboration with Nicolai Sarafov), Hugendubel, München, Germany
1995 Industrial Photography, permanent collection of the Landesgewerbeanstalt, Würzburg, Germany

AWARDS

2006 ADDY Awards (Interactive web banner for IBM)
2005 CIBA10 Award (Interactive web banner for IBM)

Upcoming and current gallery shows

Winter Group Show, Rupert Ravens Contemporary October 24, 2008 - January 18, 2009

Contact

Joergen Geerds
23-34 30th Drive
Astoria, NY 11102
Email:
Phone: +1 646 479 0977
IM: jgeerds

Please contact Thomas Jaeckel (532gallery.com, 917.701.3338, info@532gallery.com) for all fine art sales inquiries. Please contact me directly for all image licensing requests.

See my ongoing panorama projects on my photo blog at newyorkpanorama.com