New York Through the Viewfinder: Manhattan from Every Angle

Arriving Early, Shooting Early

I arrived a couple of days ahead of my Lee Frost Photography workshop, which gave me precious free time to just wander. Meeting up with a good friend who calls New York home, we hit the streets almost immediately — because that’s what you do here. You don’t sit in a coffee shop and plan. You go.

Street photography in New York is a masterclass in being present. The city moves fast and it doesn’t wait. Figures cutting through steam rising from grates below, yellow cabs blurring past monolithic glass towers, a thousand private moments playing out in the most public of spaces. The Hasselblad draws a few glances — it’s not exactly discreet — but New Yorkers have seen everything, and a camera is barely worth a second look.

Brooklyn and the Manhattan Skyline

The heart of the workshop — and the images I’d been dreaming of — was the view of Manhattan from Brooklyn. There’s a reason photographers return to these spots again and again. The skyline across the East River is simply one of the great urban vistas on earth, and the Hasselblad’s medium format sensor does it extraordinary justice.

DUMBO — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — is a neighbourhood that wears its photogenic quality almost embarrassingly well. The gap between the buildings on Washington Street frames the Manhattan Bridge perfectly, a shot so iconic it risks feeling clichéd until you’re actually standing there at blue hour with the light doing something extraordinary, and then all bets are off. Cobblestones, cast iron architecture, and that towering bridge filling your frame. It earns its reputation.

Crossing to New Jersey

For a different perspective entirely, the New Jersey waterfront — particularly around Jersey City’s Exchange Place — delivers a view of Lower Manhattan that somehow feels even more dramatic than the Brooklyn side. You’re looking directly at the Financial District, the rebuilt World Trade Centre dominating the skyline, the whole vertical spectacle reflected in the Hudson on a calm morning. It’s the kind of view that makes you stop talking mid-sentence.

Going Up: The High Vantage Points

No New York photography trip is complete without getting up high, and we made it to three of the city’s great elevated viewing platforms.

The Empire State Building needs no introduction — opened in 1931 and standing at 443 metres to its roof, it was the world’s tallest building for nearly four decades. From the 86th floor observation deck, Central Park becomes a green rectangle carved into an ocean of stone and glass, and the grid of Manhattan streets stretches away in every direction with almost mathematical precision. Shooting from here with the Hasselblad felt faintly absurd in the best possible way — medium format resolution pointed at one of the world’s most photographed skylines.

At Street Level: The Locations That Stayed With Me

Not everything was about the skyline. Some of the most compelling frames came from simply being in the city.

Grand Central Terminal is one of those buildings that stops you in your tracks even when you’ve seen it a hundred times in films. Built between 1903 and 1913 in the Beaux-Arts style, the Main Concourse is breathtaking — the turquoise celestial ceiling, the pale Tennessee marble, the great arched windows pouring shafts of light down through the dust and the motion of thousands of commuters.

The Vessel at Hudson Yards is harder to categorise. Thomas Heatherwick’s copper-clad honeycomb of 154 interconnected staircases — 2,500 individual steps rising 16 storeys — is either a public sculpture or an architectural experience or something in between. Photographically, it’s endlessly fascinating: the repeating geometric forms, the reflections in the copper panels, the way it interacts with the glass towers surrounding it.