In 2011, Marie Tomanova left her family’s farm in the small border town of Mikulov, Czech Republic, and travelled to America’s West Coast. She was 26 and alone. Despite having just completed an MFA in painting, she felt lost. It was only a year later, two weeks after moving to New York, that she found her direction after visiting a 2012 show of the late Francesca Woodman’s work at the Guggenheim museum. Woodman’s work resonated, and so began Tomanova’s journey as both a photographer and a resident of New York, employing photography to understand and carve out a place for herself in this new world.
New York, New York, which follows her acclaimed first publication Young American (2019) and which she will launch at this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles, brings together portraits shot across the city, mostly during 2019 and 2020. As Kim Gordon, formerly of the band Sonic Youth, expresses in her foreword: New York is a place of “freedom”, “good times” and ultimately somewhere that “being ‘cool’ is accessible to all, a New York kind of democracy”. And in New York, New York, an assemblage of young and – for lack of a better phrase – supremely cool individuals, who Tomanova captures in her distinctive style, embodies this spirit. Indeed, this is Tomanova’s New York, and a sense of her world – the adventure, experimentation and freedom – bursts through the individuals immortalised on the publication’s pages.
Words by Hannah Abel-Hirsch.