The Face of New York: the city, its people, and the poetry of everyday life.

New York has been photographed countless times. Yet few cities offer such an endless variety of faces, stories, and contradictions. It is a place of extraordinary energy, ambition, and creativity, but also of solitude, vulnerability, and quiet poetry.

Between 1995 and 2009, I visited New York some ten times, always discovering something new. Walking its streets with my Leica, I was drawn not only to the city's magnificent architecture and unmistakable skyline, but above all to the people who give it life. The small, often unnoticed moments of everyday existence interested me as much as the grand urban spectacle.

My photography is rooted in the tradition of humanist documentary photography, inspired by masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Elliott Erwitt, Werner Bischof, and René Gröbli. I have always loved the simplicity and honesty of black-and-white film photography, where observation, patience, and the ability to see matter more than technical perfection.

New York is a city of contrasts: wealth and hardship, hope and disappointment, monumental architecture and intimate human encounters: the city retained its extraordinary vitality.

In June 2009, I presented this body of work in an exhibition entitled The Face of New York at Galerie Seefeld 301 in Zurich. The exhibition was also featured in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which reflected on my attempt to look beyond familiar images of the city and discover its less obvious, sometimes surprising dimensions.

The Face of New York is my personal portrait of this fascinating metropolis — an attempt to capture not simply what New York looks like, but something of what it feels like to be there.