“[Mark Seliger] has found both escapes from our current predicament and heartbreaking evidence of it. These are our new cityscapes: empty crosswalks, field hospitals in Central Park’s East Meadow, and 1 World Trade beckoning through the fog, as the Twin Towers used to before it.”
—Radhika Jones, Vanity Fair
In March 2020 during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, New York City went into lockdown and the cityscape changed overnight. New Yorkers retreated indoors. Entire blocks of storefronts went dark. Silver-wet pavement on empty streets reflected new blooms on cherry blossom trees with hardly a soul to witness it. The regular chatter of the metropolis evaporated, replaced by overlapping sirens pitching and falling at a near-constant clip.
Award-winning photographer Mark Seliger felt like he was seeing his home for the first time. Not knowing how long this period would last, he decided to photograph “the city that never sleeps” in its moment of rest. He took to the desolate streets, camera in hand and often in the quietest hours, and captured the scenes now portrayed in his new photography book, The City That Finally Sleeps (on sale June 22nd). These hauntingly beautiful portraits of New York’s streets and cityscapes grip the viewer in varying balances of beauty, sorrow, wonder and quiet concern over a stillness that is both curious and wonderful at the same time.
It is rare to experience spaciousness in New York City. Even when you walk alone, you walk in a crowd. As more and more people left the city, the trajectory toward emptiness intensified. But the melancholic vacancy energized Seliger. He would drive through the city feeling like the only car in New York. He felt like it was a gift. But it was never long before the reality set in—refrigerated trucks were serving as temporary overflow morgues at Bellevue Hospital; exhausted essential workers filled the streets as they changed shifts; beloved restaurants and shops were just gone. Seliger will never forget the fragility and vulnerability of New York City during that time.
With The City That Finally Sleeps, Seliger also reminds us that artistry benefits from solitude, as does the ability to reconcile what goes on in our lives and in the world around us. New York City revealed itself to Seliger in new ways throughout this project. It was a stripped-down behemoth in repose, and we had nowhere to be, no one to see, and nothing to do but to listen to it. On the day George Floyd was killed, everyone was listening in a brand-new way. As quickly as the streets had emptied in March, they swelled back up with protests in late May. That was when Seliger knew that the project—which he took on as a personal assignment—was over. “New York tough” is real and it was cautiously roaring back, resilient as ever…awake.
The City That Finally Sleeps is a stunning work delivered to us by a world-renowned artist. It brings us sober comfort like no other, and during an otherwise dismal period in history. Each of Seliger’s quadtone portraits, spread across 110 pages, gleams with hope in the majesty of perhaps the most influential city in the world.
**All proceeds from the sale of this book will support New York Cares in their Covid-19 relief efforts. Even in uncertain times, New York Cares continues to meet pressing community needs by mobilizing caring New Yorkers in volunteer service. Since COVID-19 relief efforts began in March, thousands of volunteers have devoted their time to hundreds of projects, including on-the-ground programs that address food insecurity, and virtual programs that focus on education, mental wellness, and physical health**