Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
I still remember the first time I visited New York City with my younger sister, both of us unaware of what the city held beyond what we’ve seen in movies and postcards. I slept on the ride from the airport into the city and when I finally opened my eyes, it felt as if I had somehow driven onto a new world. In comparison to the front yards and one-story houses of my neighborhood in California, the skyscrapers of the city made me realize just how small humans are beside our creations. I stepped out into the sidewalk, paid my fare, and stood there, taking it all in, a new and strange world from its grimy streets to its seemingly unreachable building tops. In an effort to somehow preserve that feeling and share it upon returning home, I began to take snapshots of it all. Ultimately, I was dismayed by the fact that try as I might, there was no way to capture the sensation of being nothing but a small, red blood cell to the living vessel that is New York City.
As I look back through my photos of my fall break trip to New York, I notice now that so much of New York’s immense structures relies on the repetition of its most basic aspects. It’s all windows upon windows, floors built upon floors, chandelier after chandelier, and similar repetitions all throughout to build a unity that holds it all together while allowing for it to expand beyond what our eye can capture. When we take in these architectural creations, whether from the ground up or from a window, our eye follows the path of structures that allow us as viewers to witness the immense size of them while taking it all as one entity. Through these selected pieces, I hope to bring focus to how repetition of these aspects create structures of unimaginable sizes that still present as whole pieces, rather than an assemblage of different parts.
New York, 2015
Window View, 2015
Grand Central Terminal, 2015
New York Building, 2015
New York Times, 2015
Flag In NY, 2015
Brooklyn Bridge, 2015
NY Building 2, 2015
