Empire of Glass

I made this photograph from the Jersey City waterfront on an evening when the sky had gone completely featureless, a flat grey lid pressing down on the harbour. Most photographers would have packed up. I stayed because I wanted exactly that emptiness overhead. When the sky offers nothing, the city has to carry the entire frame on its own, and Manhattan is one of the few skylines arrogant enough to do it.

Two minutes on the shutter. The Hudson went black and still, absorbing just enough reflected light from the towers to create a faint luminous band along the waterline. The compression of the telephoto stacked the buildings together into a single mass, which is how the skyline actually feels when you stand across the water from it. Not individual towers but a collective assertion. One World Trade Center rises through the centre like a spine, and everything else arranges itself around that vertical. I kept the framing symmetrical and the horizon dead centre because any compositional drama would have competed with the subject. The image needed to be as still as the water.

This is the urban counterpoint in a body of work that is otherwise concerned with natural and classical space. I include it because cities are landscapes too, shaped by the same forces of ambition and indifference that shape mountains. Manhattan does not care if you photograph it. It was there before you arrived and it will outlast your shutter click by centuries. That is the same quality I find in the Himalayas, just expressed in glass and steel instead of granite and ice.