There’s an obvious mood to the photographs in Metropolitan Melancholia: An old Greek furrier sits behind window bars in his office near Penn Station, his face pensive. A smoker, with only hand and filter tip visible, lurks in the deep entryway to a brownstone office building. A kid peers out the window of his school bus, cast in a rust-colored gloom even though the signage on the wall behind him is bright. The book, by life-and-work partners Sarah van Rij and David van der Leeuw, is the product of two months the couple spent here in 2021 and 2022, documenting a city that had just begun unsheltering-in-place. They’d been here two years earlier, but felt compelled to return after lockdown: “The mood of the city felt different — so many people had left,” Sarah says. “That’s when the project actually started.” The 2019 round of pictures had been published as a sort of romantic walk around New York. “And then it developed into something more raw, and the romantic went away.”
The book is wordless, apart from the title and a little poem (by the photographers, constructed on the page by the designer Matt Willey), that appears across two early pages. They shoot both analog film and digital, moving back and forth at will. The book switches just as easily between color and black-and-white, and the color photos, too, have something of a premodern look to them, with the slightly red-brown cast of Charles Cushman’s Kodachromes. That is less a deliberate effect, David says, than it is simply the subject matter: “In New York especially, the colors are sort of Kodachrome — it turns very quickly into a filter.”
If there’s a visual theme to the collection, it’s layering: The images often depend on reflections in puddles or storefronts, or on looking through a thin reflection in the glass (or those window bars in front of the old Greek) to a second image within. Your eye is pulled forward and back at once. “A lot of people ask, what’s our technique? Double exposure?” It isn’t any kind of a trick like that: It’s all in-camera, full-frame. They just compose (carefully) and click. “Filling up the surfaces,” Sarah says, making an analogy to painting, “so you really choose what to put there in the corner, to make the whole frame balanced.”
