黑料不打烊

Does a city really ever have a traceable face? Granted, a modern day metropolis may have facades, thousands, millions of them, reflecting surfaces for the demanding visitor麓s mind. Depending on your emotions at a specific moment and time, differents things will surface here. Mix that with decades of history and culture and things are getting carved into those facades. You know, little signs of the past, brutal things and ever so often also the most banal things. 

Great architects every once in a while may possibly add ideas, buildings and surrounding space, but in the end it麓s people like Andreas H. Bitesnich who come for serious reflection and start connecting their impressions to show us what their eyes have caught. That麓s when those images start morphing into a city麓s and a person麓s story. Andreas H. Bitesnich has come and looked and taken pictures many times. But only recently New York City has unleashed its personal narrative to him. It麓s a story麓s full of shades, darker, deeper than in any other plots he麓s ever told. 

His journey unfolds full or harsh contrasts, rough grain and moody sepia in tough and direct flashes of communication. Remnants of some phrases, words and signs we may have picked up here as well at some point. The endeavor here is made clear right away. This is not about sightseeing, it is about seeing a mood, galvanised to the almost cartoonlike extreme at times. A story of a modern day Gotham City with no superheroes in sight. Bitesnich takes us on a speedy road trip at the city麓s gut level, a stage full of contradicting warnings, slogans in a world often devoid of midtones, where people are bystanders in the midsts of all those the patterns and the dirty texture of a city in a permanent rush. 

Look closer and read those signs of modern day gloom and you麓ll hear a deep, resonant voice not heard before, embedded in the sound of sirens.
Manfred Zollner