2021
With art historian Thomas Beachdel, Marie Tomanova presents a second book New York New York (Hatje Cantz, 2021) with foreword by Kim Gordon.
Documenting the freedom of youth and the mythic pull of New York City, New York New York refines and expands the narrative of Tomanova's highly acclaimed first book with Beachdel, Young American (Paradigm Publishing, 2019) with introduction by photographer Ryan McGinley.
Tomanova launched her new book New York New York at Dashwood Books on Sept. 29. It will be followed by her solo exhibition at C24 Gallery in Chelsea opening on Oct. 7, 2021.
Marie Tomanova’s New York New York is a landscape of youth and a portrait of place—entwining person and environment. New York City is an almost mythic entity, a place of both coming to and becoming in. Depending on one’s point of view, it has been—and perhaps still is—a gateway to “America,” to a new life, to a land of vast opportunity. It has been the kernel and the door to a future for those arriving from another country, as well as from other parts of the United States, to find, express, and be themselves.
Shot in New York City, mostly in 2019 and 2020, Tomanova merges the genres of portrait and landscape to effortlessly bounce off one another, revealing a social landscape inextricably linked to place, a portrait of a certain New York City, one that is a picture of her world, a landscape of her life.
Tomanova left her family farm in the small border town of Mikulov in the Czech Republic and came to the United States in 2011 and to New York in 2012, alone, knowing no one. And her world expands. It is a story of dreaming, risking, surviving, and finding one’s own way, and it likely mirrors the aspirations and the emotional landscape of the individuals Tomanova has photographed for New York New York.
It is often easy to look back and not see the struggle, not see the hardship, to forget the moments of pain and difficulty that can loom so large in the process of finding oneself in a new place. The antidote, of course, is to focus on the dream, the motivation; to build a world in which to fit or to find a place of belonging. New York New York is that big city of dreams.
--Thomas Beachdel
“Marie’s book is a celebration of that young community. You don’t mind struggling for rent and food because you feel alive in the city. This was not really my early '80s NY, I was already old, twenty-seven. I had anxiety about the art world. I felt way too middle class. Discovering the downtown music scene was a hunt; it was work, or my kind of fun. I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for becoming . . .”
“In this collection of exuberant photos Marie captures the inside look, as it is now, being “cool” is accessible to all, a New York kind of democracy.”
--Kim Gordon