Manhattan Impressions are a series of chromogenic prints drawn from my first encounter with New York City. I visited in 2002 with a camera and rolls of black-and-white film, and spent a long weekend photographing in a street-photography mode, taking in the sights and textures of a city I was discovering in real time. Photographs from that weekend were among the first I ever exhibited; this series returns to that material more than two decades later.
Each piece layers ten frames from that trip into a single composition, using techniques of transparent superposition first developed in Iterations and extended in The Orange Coast. Those series kept an anchor, repeated architectural forms in one and a shared ocean horizon in the other. Manhattan Impressions lets the anchor go: no two exposures hold anything in common, and the city’s fragments — bridge cables, fire escapes, taxicabs, street signs, passersby — surface and dissolve into a dense weave of simultaneous moments. In this the series shares a concern with the Impressionists, who were also drawn to the modern city as a rush of transitory sensation — light, crowds, movement — and who painted the experience rather than the thing.
The original negatives were black and white; the color was added later, frame by frame, the way memory colors what it keeps. Built from early film scans and printed at an intimate scale relative to my other work, these are soft, atmospheric images — closer to memory than to record, and meant to be taken in whole rather than in part. This is New York not as it is, but as it feels to remember meeting it for the first time: gauzy, luminous, and new.
Dibond-mounted chromogenic prints
Each 18″H × 27″W, edition of 2 + 1 AP
Jesse Colin Jackson, 2026
