Luminous New York — Lumin-o-City

With each panorama, Joergen Geerds strives to capture a specific moment in the life of the city. He tries to answer questions like, “Where do people spend their nights? How? What are the small moments that move them?” Each image reveals a particular emotion—the one that’s special to that particular place, to that moment.

With 9 million cliff-dwellers, New York City is the ultimate inhabited mountain range. The city offers an unparalleled opportunity to capture both the grand monument-scapes that form the backdrop of modern life as well as its quieter, more intimate moments. This gives Geerds the opportunity to move the whole art of panoramas in a different direction: to take it out of the classical, natural setting—get away from photographs of mountaintops and fields—and plunk it down in an urban zone full of its own high mountains and canyons—skyscrapers, billboards, avenues, and streets.

And New York offers an unequalled range of luminosity. It glows under many hypnotic sources of light—from apartments, street lamps, the accent lights of buildings, construction rigs, cars, and more. This luminosity is a gift for a photographer who wants to record the full range of human activity.

What’s more, the long exposures catch urban dwellers in rare moments of stillness. A long exposure turns a crowd of kids into ghostly shadows. It invests otherwise dark areas with rich, velvety detail.

But the aspect of the life of a panorama-photographer that Geerds most enjoys is how the form allows all of this—light and darkness, epic scope and intimate detail—to happen simultaneously, playing out as slowly or as immediately as the viewer wishes. Each of his panoramas gives viewers many opportunities to connect with the moment he has singled out. And Geerds enjoys nothing more than finding new connections every time he goes out to shoot.

All photos are printed on a OCE Lightjet (digital c-prints) and then face-mounted against UV non-glare plexi glass (also known as diasec mount) and backed with a rigid substrate like Dibond. Custom sizes and mounts are possible.