ARTISTS Alessandro Valeri

Panorama:
photographs from New York

Panorama is a photographic project by Alessandro Valeri centered on images taken in New York during the 1980s, a decisive period in the cultural and visual transformation of the city. The project was presented in 2013 at the PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, curated by Jonathan Turner and Francesca Pietracci, as part of a broader reflection on the relationship between the human body, urban space and collective memory.

Rather than offering a conventional retrospective, Panorama unfolds as a conceptual landscape in which different bodies of work interact with each other. The title itself suggests not a totalizing view, but an expanding horizon: a field in which images become tools for crossing and exploring reality rather than simply representing it.

At the core of the project are photographs taken in neighborhoods such as Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem, the East Village, Alphabet City and the Meatpacking District, capturing a New York that existed before the waves of gentrification that would later transform the city. Valeri portrays an urban environment marked by contrasts: decaying buildings, worn signage, empty parking lots and crowded storefronts coexist with moments of everyday life unfolding in the streets.

In some images, scenes are photographed through the window of a car, a choice that allowed the artist to observe and document areas considered dangerous without interfering with the life of the streets. These images reveal spontaneous fragments of urban life—children playing football on sidewalks, pedestrians moving through the city, anonymous figures suspended between presence and disappearance.

The project also reflects on the cultural climate of the time through references to places associated with Andy Warhol during the last year of his life. Valeri is not interested in portraying the pop icon itself, but in capturing the atmosphere of a city that seemed to have lost one of its most perceptive interpreters. The photographs become traces of an absence, fragments of an urban memory that was about to disappear under the pressure of economic and social change.

Light and shadow play a central role in Valeri’s photographic language. Carefully controlled lighting enhances the material presence of buildings, streets and surfaces, transforming documentary observation into a visual experience that is both poetic and reflective. Through these images, the city becomes a complex emotional landscape in which architecture, people and memory converge.

In this sense, the New York photographs form a kind of emotional and conceptual atlas, where the urban environment is not simply described but experienced as a living organism—fragile, vibrant and constantly evolving.