LOCATIONS, NEW YORK
(english edition)

The images that make up Locations, New York are more than ten years old. 2014. Ten years ago, a few weeks before Instagram became the hegemonic approach to photography in our lives, opening the floodgates to the urge to endlessly spot and capture images. And further still, trivialising its significance.
Giasco Bertoli was in New York for a few days, his notebook filled with locations that cinema – at the height of its golden age (his personal pantheon shared by so many of us: Scorsese, Gray, Hitchcock) – had made immortal. Immortal, but still elusive. The question is: what drives a photographer to return to the scene of the crime? And even more so, a crime committed by someone else: a filmmaker.
What are we looking for in a place that’s already been revealed by cinema? What kind of proof are we seeking? Did we dream it all up? Do things stay the same once they’ve been filmed? What traces does the camera’s gaze leave behind? Does the scene continue forever, once filming is over? Does it remain suspended in a time loop? Does Harry still want to meet Sally? Are they there, sitting at the same table at Katz’s? Is she still screaming with joy?
This series is not a tribute to architecture. These images are more like the snapshots of a dazzling, impervious city. His ‘locations’ sometimes follow in the footsteps of the films Giasco Bertoli measures himself against, but he never aims to quote them nor reproduce their effect: Giasco Bertoli
captures the remnants. The scene is empty, populated only by ghosts that we must learn to see.
So, we go check it out to verify the tragic hypothesis: I saw nothing at the cinema because of my body. If many of us return to the traces of our cinephile memory, it’s because cinema, as it flows, always prevents us from grasping the thing itself. But when photographed, the city becomes material. And this time, it’s the city that comes to us. Who benefits from the crime? Cinema? I’m not entirely certain…
Torn from the unreeling of film, a Giasco Bertoli photograph is never a still frame, or a parody of one. It returns to the very source of fascination: American street photography. And here we understand that it was already the subject of that spoiled child cinema’s jealousy.
Philippe Azoury

Giasco Bertoli is a Swiss Italian photographer who lives and works in Paris. He discovers photography at the age of twelve, when he receives his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic Pocket 200. He studied photography at the European Institute of Design in Milan and at the New School in New York. Since the 1990s, his work has focused on sport, cinema, youth, music and landscape. Locations, New York is his tenth book and he regularly contributes to various international publications, including the magazine Purple, in which many of his portraits are published.

Jeff Rian is a writer and musician, and deputy editor of Purple magazine. He has written numerous essays and exhibition catalogues and is a regular contributor to Art in America, Flash Art, frieze and Artforum magazines. He is the author of The Buckshot Lexicon and Purple Years, and has written monographs on artists including Richard Prince, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Lewis Baltz and Stéphane Dafflon. His CDs include Everglade, with Jean-Jacques Palix; Fanfares and 8 de pique for Alexandra Roos; Wind & Wood and Météo with Bob Coke; as well as Battle Songs, Such Is Life, and Sketches.

Photographs: Giasco Bertoli
Preface: Jeff Rian
Graphic design: Célestine Claudin