New York Tales: Sought after art

The tourist gaze - the whole of New York looks like this....

One of the advantages of the time delay is that by mid-afternoon New York time the (smow)boss is at home and so we can go out and enjoy New York City.
On Friday we took the opportunity for a stroll through Manhattan … and like every other tourist spent most of the time taking photos of skyscrapers.
Regardless how often you take such a photo, the next view seems even better. And don’t even get us started on the next…..

However, to truly capture the majesty you need much better equipment that we have, a lot more time and a photographers eye to judge the perfect perspective.
One man who has the equipment, was given the time and certainly has the talent is Leipzig based photographer Frank-Heinrich Müller – curator of the exhibition EAST_for the record.

In 1996 Müller travelled to New York on a DAAD grant to work on a series of large format photos of the city. Together with Prof. Peter Marcuse of the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, Müller documented the many, and the changing, faces of the city.

New York by Frank-Heinrich Müller. Stolen from the smow store in Chemnitz

In 2007 he lent one of the pictures to the (smow)pavillion in Chemnitz.
On January 6 2008 the picture was stolen from the store, along with a limited edition Eames Lounge Chair and a USM USM Haller sideboard.
If you forgive our inappropriate humour at an inappropriate point, that sounds like our sort of living room.

Particularly bitter with the theft of photographic art is that the insurance only pay the costs of remaking the work – so a flight to NYC and a couple of days in hotel.

Which clearly can’t replace either the personal memories from the time when you made the photo, nor the relationship that builds up with the work over the intervening years as one continually reassess and reconsider the work and it’s context.

Three months after the robbery the police still had no firm leads and so laid the case ad acta. The photo has been registered with The Artloss Register and Frank-Heinrich would still like to have it back.

You couldn't make it up...East Houston Street, NYC

So next time you see some cheap prints of NYC for sale at a market, in a shop or online; keep an eye out for this image.

We can’t guarantee a reward, but we can guarantee one very happy photographer.

And a small range of Frank-Heinrichs New York photos can be found on his Flickr page.