shashasha

“Metropolitan Melancholia” explores the complex push and pull of the modern city, and the weight of its textured histories. Alluring and repellent, cities intoxicate those they beckon.

Photographing New York from 2019 to 2022, David van der Leeuw and Sarah van Rij – long-term partners in life, work and love – brought their own distinct expectations to this iconic cityscape. Together and apart, they walked its streets and absorbed its contours, along and beyond paths trodden by the ceaseless waves of artists, writers and filmmakers before them. For both, the camera was a means to grasp at New York’s contradictions, submit to its spells and think through its oppressive confines.

Surreal and painterly, their abstract images envelop city-dwellers in architectural compositions of light and shadow; cinematic fragments converge with splintered sketches of the everyday. More uneasy back-and-forth than one-sided love letter, “Metropolitan Melancholia” unties two poetic dialogues with the city.