Christopher Thomas - New York Sleeps at Wapping Project Bankside

Christopher Thomas - New York Sleeps at Wapping Project Bankside

13 January, 2011
by: Katuschka

Sci-fi films, apocalyptic short stories and very late nights/early mornings: Kate Weir sees them all in the photography of Christopher Thomas.

Photos of abandoned cityscapes usually have 28 Days Later-style apocalyptic connotations (such as Yves Marchand and Roman Meffres' Chernobyl images); a Day of the Triffids-esque 'return to nature' narrative (such as Gunkanjima island in Japan); or are used as economic cautionary tales (the neo-gothic disintegration of Detroit has been particularly well mined for this trope). Or they can be a way to induce digital extinction to fulfil ‘the world as your playground’ childhood fantasies - a la Matt Logue's empty LA series.

However, with New York Sleeps at Wapping Project Bankside, German photographer Christopher Thomas has sidestepped these doom allegories, in spite of New York’s lurking terrorism imprint, to capture the essence of the consummate night owl's dawn walk home. His photographs of New York, at ambiguous times of day and devoid of any signs of life, are a rare and elegant glimpse of a city in repose.

Naturally, in the titular ‘city that never sleeps’, creating this series was a challenge. Thomas has spent over ten years waiting for the right moment to capture these images. The photographs are like a showhome New York, pristine and accessible. However this facet brings up my only criticism of the show – in choosing a city as saturated into our cultural vernacular as New York, Thomas has left himself open to accusations of cliché and derivation. Images of the Brooklyn Bridge and Rockerfeller Centre are as ubiquitous as Athena prints of a chiseled man kissing a baby, no matter how precise Thomas’s composition is. His work is more effective when using more unusual sights, such as Katz's Deli or the Eugene Atget-inspired shot of the Flatiron Building.

Largely, Thomas’s images manage both to capture the magic of the hazy, pre-morning after the night before, and to remind me in some ways of Neil Gaiman’s A Tale of Two Cities. In this short story a man is driven insane by the overwhelming personality of a megalopolis and can only repress this fear by believing the city to be sleeping. “If the city was dreaming,” he rationalises, “then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping.... What I fear, is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise”.

Just outside the frame of Thomas’s images is the threat that New York will rise again, to the frantic chaos of the everyday; but for now it’s simply a sleeping beauty in a corker of a show.

Christopher Thomas - New York Sleeps is at Wapping Project Bankside until 26th February 2011. 

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Image credit: Christopher Thomas, The Corner Deli, 2008)

Katuschka