Quentin Henry - New York, New York

Overview

New York, New York explores how personal and collective memory shape urban identity through an interconnected series of works. The project examines the city as both lived experience and perpetual self-image, using various media to probe the intersection of private memory and public space. From Google Street View's algorithmic captures to stranger-drawn maps, from long-exposure photographs to train window observations, each piece reveals how the city exists simultaneously as geographic reality and psychological construct. The work deliberately exposes the limitations and possibilities of preservation, using both digital and analog media to explore how memory, like the city itself, is both a shared construction and a constantly evolving fragment.

Publication Design Photogrammetry Mixed Media Video Installation Photography Writing

7th & 2nd Ave (2019): Memory pirated from Google's archive. A childhood intersection reconstructed from corporate surveillance.

Lost and Found · A Journey Through Digital Fragments

Following an enigmatic narrative through Street View screenshots, this publication traces a path through fast food establishments and street corners, exploring how digital platforms create their own peculiar geography of the city. Printed on delicate Japanese paper with hyperlink-blue dialogue, the book contrasts digital ephemera with physical craft.

New York Atlas Vol. 1 · Collective Memory Mapping

A compilation of stranger-drawn maps collected from a slow elevator, this atlas presents the city as remembered, imagined, and felt. From geographic precision to emotional landscapes, each contribution reveals how personal experience shapes urban space. The project transforms a solitary elevator into a site of collective cartography.

Light Studies · Time Compressed

Long-exposure photographs capture the city's nocturnal energy through streaks of light and movement. Shot on medium format film, these images compress minutes of urban motion into single frames. The visible film text (Kodak, Ultra) grounds these abstract compositions in photographic materiality, creating tension between documentation and transformation.

Architectural Abstractions · Solid State

Daytime studies of modernist architecture, focusing on the AT&T Long Lines Building and similar structures. These images explore how harsh shadows and careful framing can transform familiar buildings into abstract forms, questioning the relationship between urban functionality and form.

Notebook Book · Walking Through Memory

A circular narrative that uses walking as both metaphor and method for understanding urban space. The text moves through three interconnected cycles, each wrestling with how grid systems simultaneously constrain and enable movement. The writing shifts between concrete observation and philosophical reflection, using the act of walking to explore questions of purpose, discovery, and return. The semi-transparent paper creates a palimpsest effect - each page reveals ghosts of what's coming and traces of what's passed, mirroring how memory and anticipation color our experience of place. Technical annotations and figure numbers bring pseudo-scientific rigor to emotional and existential observations, creating productive tension between systematic documentation and subjective experience. The piece culminates in an extended meditation on the search for the "opposite of New York," a journey that reveals how escape from the grid paradoxically leads back to it. This circular structure, reinforced by the book's design, suggests how urban experience is shaped by patterns of departure and return.

Fukuoka · Subtitles for a City

One-frame-per-second footage from a bullet train window at dusk, overlaid with text that weaves between everyday frustrations and historical gravity. The work connects personal experience to broader narratives of technology, catastrophe, and urban life.