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Introduction

I am not a photographer of cities. I would even go so far as to say that the city seems to me to be a "mistake" opposed to the happiness of mankind. To this radical judgement, however, I would make two exceptions: Venice and New York. Two cities with very different faces but where, strangely, I feel at ease, in harmony.

But here we speak only of New York, to which I came by chance. So many cultures are mixed together in this city, so many strangers cohabit here, that no matter how much of a stranger -- and even precisely because you are a stranger -- you become a New Yorker as well. You merge with the movement, a mixture that is always boiling beneath a surface that has already set. What I love about Manhattan is that behind its well-ordered exteriors it is in reality a crazy city, full of skyscrapers that are excessive but never ridiculous; it is a city of total coherence and yet infinitely free, varied, luxurious.

And then there is the light that comes off the sea, the reflections that come and go on the long facades of glass and mirror. This proximity to the ocean blows away the pollution and gives the air of New York a kind of transparent luminosity, unique, a purity rare for a megalopolis of this scale.

Finally, to fly over New York gives me a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as each time I discover new beauty nestled in the heights, highly worked roofs and complex feats of architecture of which New Yorkers themselves are unaware, because not everyone can fly over the city. I have had that opportunity and I have gained from it. I have even taken advantage of it in the avowed ambition to reveal to others this new face of New York, to distort the city until they can no longer recognize it, so that they in turn may rediscover it.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Excerpted by permission of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.. Copyright c 1998 by Éditions de La Martiniére, Paris.