The Swiss photographer Jonas Burkhalter has been living and taking photos in the Big Apple for a few years. Now he is showing his pictures in Zurich – including the Covid crisis and ‘Black Lives Matter’.
Posted today at 12:33 pm—
–So poetic that it brings tears to your eyes: Park Avenue, which has been swept empty.
Photo: Jonas Burkhalter
This is a picture that would not have been possible a few months ago. But then the virus came. Even New York, the city that never sleeps, fell into a twilight state. And Jonas Burkhalter, born in Baar in 1983 and at home half in Zurich and half in New York for a few years, got on his bike early in the morning, drove to Park Avenue, stood with his camera in the middle of the road and took a picture so full of urban poetry it brings tears to your eyes.
The three-lane road swept empty; red traffic lights, robbed of their authority, stand like decorative lanterns in a trellis and flirt with the spring green behind them. The pitted asphalt directs the gaze into the depths; when do you see that New York is not completely flat, but rather undulates in rolling hills? And at the very back, in the shady vanishing point, the Grand Central Station and the Helmsley Building stand out in an almost oriental style in front of the sunlit MetLife Tower. “I only had to wave a few cars through before I had the road to myself,” recalls Burkhalter. “After a quarter of an hour the picture was in the box.”
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