Manhattan Out

Manhattan Out collects photographs Raymond Depardon took on the streets of New York in the winter of 1980, shot on a Leica without ever raising the camera to his eye. Depardon, a longtime Magnum photographer, filmmaker, and journalist, was in the city visiting a friend and began photographing to pass the time; shooting without a viewfinder was a deliberate constraint meant to produce unplanned, less composed images. He judged the results a failure and put the negatives away for nearly three decades.

Steidl published the book in 2009, reproducing 97 tritone images across 120 pages. When Depardon returned to the negatives decades later, he found that many of his subjects had noticed the camera despite his blind technique, giving the pictures a self-consciousness he had not intended. The result documents early-1980s Manhattan street life with a candor mixed with awareness that Depardon had not planned for. Philosopher Paul Virilio contributes an accompanying essay.

Depardon co-founded the Gamma photo agency in 1966 and joined Magnum Photos in 1978. His work ranges from war reportage and documentary filmmaking to long-running studies of French rural and urban life. Manhattan Out is one of his few sustained bodies of work made in New York, and its 2009 publication brought into public view pictures he had shelved as a private failure for most of his career.