Gotham City is an extraordinary journey in New York City by italian photographer Luca Campigotto. The photographs are collected in the recent book published by Damiani.
Like the fictional American city appearing in comic books, Gotham City has a visionary and imaginative aspect, a place in which you can lose yourself, a landscape within the landscape.
From the East River bridges to the Empire State Building, Times Square to the old docks of Brooklyn, each image looks like a scene in a movie, a vision of the city informed by a thousand films, or by the paintings of Edward Hopper.
The sixty photographs contained in this book were taken over the course of more than a decade by Luca Campigotto during his fequent trips to the Big Apple. Campigotto captures the city in all its romantic glory, and with all his interests for landscapes, architecture, industrial sites and archeology.
His vision of New York, mostly at night, has an evocative power, like a visionary city where reigns an atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy.
“The images in this book are born from eyes full of movies and old
photographs by Berenice Abbott, Samuel Gottscho, Charles
Ebbets, Alfred Stieglitz, Lewis Hine, Eugene de Salignac, Andreas
Feininger… In love with the visual world—both documentary
and poetic—that they created, I followed the tangle of its many
associations while trying to evoke something lingering in the air.
The still visible and epic atmosphere of a place I wanted to capture.
The backdrop of an heroic era distended in time, vaguely datable. The setting for a Chinese shadow puppet play where you might still see Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, and maybe Ernest Hemingway moaning to Eugenio Montale about New York’s stinkyness.
(…) Legend has it that the real Gotham City is Manhattan below 14th
Street, eleven minutes after midnight on the coldest November
night —from Soho to Greenwich Village, the Bowery, Little Italy,
Chinatown and the grimmest areas at the bottom of Manhattan
and The Brooklyn Bridge. It is also said that Metropolis is New York
by day and Gotham City New York by night. Certainly, Gotham
implies a visionary world derived from Gothic architecture,
Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. The nightmare of a dark, rainy urban
decadence, pierced by the lights of cars and the dazzling backlight
of the floodlights. A “Dick Tracy” world of big black cars
and gangsters in double-breasted suits, trench coats, and borsalino
hats. This is the whirling town where only the scathing
flash of Weegee arrives on the crime scene before Batman does.”
Text by Luca Campigotto, it’s an extract from the book Gotham City.
Emiliana Tedesco
Book
Luca campigotto: Gotham City
Damiani Editions
13.25 x 10.75 in.
120 pages
ISBN: 9788862082372
US $50.00
Exhibitions:
Luca campigotto: Gotham City
From February 2nd to March 3rd, 2013
Bugno Art Gallery
S. Marco 1996/d
30124 Venezia
Italy
+39 041 5231305
Luca campigotto: Gotham City
From February 28th to April 13th, 2013
Laurence Miller
20 W 57th St, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10019
USA
Téléphone :+1 212-397-3930
Wednesday to Saturday, 11:00am – 5:30pm and by appointment
