New York has been photographed thousands of times, but Noris Cocci looks at it differently. In the book New York State of Mind, released in 2024 by TG Publishing, the photographer sets aside postcards and skyscrapers and focuses on what usually goes unnoticed. He considers it the culmination of a journey that began with Snowsnap and Sicilian Elements.
Noris Cocci walked the streets of Manhattan, the multiethnic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the tree-lined avenues of Queens. He looks for quiet moments, spontaneous gestures, almost abstract scenes. Light cuts through the buildings, shadows swallow passersby, reflections double the shop windows. Two ghostly figures behind a pane of glass. A woman suspended in the golden skyline, face to face with the Empire State Building. In some images only the feet remain, in heels, hurrying along the sidewalk. Who do they belong to? Where are they going?
These are fragments of life that, put together, become a story. Cocci speaks of a metropolis turned into an emotional landscape, where the joys of nightlife coexist with the solitude of parks at dusk. The result is a New York that is inner before it is urban. Almost nine million people, different languages, chaos and beauty, hope and melancholy. Noris Cocci does not try to capture them all. He gathers the fragments and leaves it to the viewer to piece them back together.
The volume runs to 96 pages, has a hardcover, measures 24.7 x 30.7 cm and is bilingual, in Italian and English. Alongside the photographs are texts by Angelo Raffaele Turetta, a film set photographer in Italian cinema and a 2001 World Press Photo winner, and by the Australian critic Rosamund Brennan, who describes the series as an elegy to urban life. Turetta admits he has never been to New York, yet feels he has always known it. These images, he says, made him see it differently.
The book opens with a line by Georgia O’Keeffe, according to whom New York is not painted as it is but as it is felt. Cocci photographs it exactly that way. For those who love street photography and photobooks, New York State of Mind is an invitation to slow down and look beyond the surface.
