Does a city really have a traceable face? Granted, a modern day metropolis may have facades, thousands, millions of them, reflecting surfaces for the demanding visitor’s mind. Depending on your emotions at a specific moment and time, different things will surface here. Mix that with decades of history and culture and things are being carved into those facades. You know, little signs of the past, brutal things and ever so often also the most banal things. Great architects may once in a while add ideas, buildings and surrounding space, but in the end it’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’s when those images start morphing into a city’s and a person’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’s a story full of shades, darker, deeper than in any other plots he’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 as 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´s gut level, a stage full of contradicting warnings, slogans in a world often devoid of midtones, where people are bystanders in the midst of all those patterns and dirty texture of a city in permanent rush. Look closer and read those signs of modern day gloom and you’ll hear a deep, resonant voice not heard before, embedded in the sound of sirens.

Manfred Zollner