Simulacra and the City:
Stephen Clarke’s New York 1995–1996

Askance tales of a storied city, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Stephen Clarke’s record of a “brief moment” that nevertheless offers up a multi-lens cultural reckoning…

It’s the city that never sleeps; the place where you can take a walk on the wild side.

One of the world’s most filmed cities, it has been endlessly mediated; through cinema, but also song, TV, theatre, art and more. We all think we know it, can picture it, hear it, even; and can imagine scenes playing out on its streets (that aren’t, funnily enough, paved with gold), in loft apartments, and atop eminently recognisable buildings.

When a nameless, almost silhouette of a figure waves down a taxi-cab, just out of shot, you think you hear a strangled, exasperated: “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin here!” Meanwhile, shuttered shop-fronts jostle, incongruously, with huge, aspirational billboard ads for DKNY: star of this particular scene the Statue of Liberty might be, but grime and grit is rarely too far from view.

Rooftops. They hum with and foreshadow the still to come parkour-style police chases, in which a crook thumbs his nose at authority, screaming “made it ma! Top of the world!”, only seconds later to trip on his own hubris, falling, so that he clings on by his fingernails to the building’s edge, before plunging to his death.

At the end of the block, nestled alongside those trademark yellow taxi-cabs, we can take our pick of fast-food from Pizza, Big Wok, and Khyber Kabab. This, after all, is the city home to the most languages spoken per head of population anywhere in the world – New York was, and continues to be, built on immigration.

Landing on another image from Stephen Clarke’s New York 1995–1996 (a new photobook from the prolific Café Royal Books), we’re confronted with a haunting by architecture, in the shape of the Twin Towers of One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center. They’re not front and centre, however, as many a photographer would choose to stage a picture of them. Instead, shot from (presumably) across the Hudson River, they somehow loiter in the background, uncertain. Knowing what we know today, they have acquired a ghostly, not quite present, transparent quality.

The Empire State Building is given similar treatment by Clarke (top). It has been edged out of the foreground, one populated by a vertiginous architectural hotch-potch of indeterminate provenance. Still, its status as cultural signifier means that its mere presence recalls – cannot help but recall – countless moments from cinema history (frequently from the third act). It has been climbed by a doomed King Kong, played host to perhaps the ultimate tear-jerking proposal in An Affair to Remember, and the pastiche/homage paid to it by Sleepless in Seattle. And, for eight hours and five minutes, it is the subject of Andy Warhol’s Empire.

Inadvertently conjuring tributes, laments and everything in-between, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Clarke’s record of what he describes as but a “brief moment” in the city’s history. The photographs evoke, he says, “a time when I became a New Yorker for one week.” The ‘moment’ the pictures capture punctuate a tumultuous period: from the AIDS crisis and the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to the outset of Rudi Giuliani’s term as mayor and the relative naivete (even if it didn’t seem so at the time) of a world which would, from 11 September, 2001, be forever changed.

Dualities abound: this is at once a time of sitcoms Seinfeld (below), and Friends, but also of the nihilistic casual sex and psychopathy of Larry Clark’s Kids. NYC is a city haunted by addiction (Abel Ferrara, The Addiction) and Patrick Bateman poseurs, yet it is a place whose streets people of course continue to flock to, streets, versions of them anyway, captured and continuously presented to us in a flood of simulacra.

From our current vantage point, then, these are photographs offering a multiple-lens reckoning, even as they look askance at the city and its icons of the built environment. Tourist snaps they aren’t. Such is New York’s cultural heft and baggage, however, that the blurring of the line between reality and otherwise is irresistible. Contained within each and every one of these images is a veritable tsunami of involuntary cultural recall.

Slippage between the layers, the real and hyperreal, is at this point unavoidable. In a chapter dedicated to New York in Ripped Backsides, his book ‘tracing ruined maps of the noir cities’, Richard Cabut writes: “Man says city isn’t a place or a movie or a painting, it’s a play about the rehearsal of a play. Like in that film we once saw.”

The film in question is likely Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre director, Caden Cotard, sets about making a massive production, the lines between fiction and reality indistinct. “There are millions of people in the world,” says Cotard, “and none of those people is an extra.” In another fragment from Ripped Backsides, Cabut, aptly, regards New York as a “City of unspooling film.”

New York, New York: a city so great they named it twice. City as filmic entity, an idea – or, more accurately, a palimpsest of ideas, each inseparable from the next. This is city as proliferation, a symphony of meaning, learned and transmitted via the screen, projecting at 24 frames per second – even within the bounds of a single photograph.

Mike Pinnington

New York 1995–1996 by Stephen Clarke is available now through Café Royal Books

All images © Stephen Clarke