Er had them all: Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster. John Irving and Philipp Roth. Cindy Sherman and Yoko Ono. Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper and Willem Dafoe. Nick Cave and Charles Bradley. The Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Reich, John Cage, Tom Wolfe, Frank Stella, Jeff Koons, Art Spiegelman, Louis Farrakhan and many more names who have belonged to the stars in the firmament that western cultural- and calls the spirit world. If you leaf through the splendid photo book “The New York Years” (Distance Verlag Berlin) by the Persian-American photographer Ashkan Sahihi, you might think you are seeing a conceptual series of famous people, in many cases New Yorkers, with more than 200 portraits. who have had a particularly powerful influence on the intellectual and aesthetic feelings of at least two generations – and not only in America and Western Europe. Her work was not only found in bestseller lists, but is still present in feature sections, exhibitions and university curricula, not to mention its influence on the contemporary art, music, literature, film, dance and show landscape.
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However, there was no concept behind this collection of famous people to present New York as the intellectual world capital of the nineties and noughties. Because Sahihi, who has caused a sensation in the past two decades with concept works such as “Drug Series” or “Die Berlinerin” (also published as a book by Fern Verlag), thought at the time when many of the New York photographs were taken , not yet on series. “The portraits in the book were all commissioned work for agencies, magazines and publishers,” remembers Sahihi, who has lived in Berlin for several years, in an interview with the FAS. That the collection now appears like a Who’s Who is “a fortunate coincidence which surprised us when we looked through my archive, “says the photographer:” We mustn’t forget that some of the people portrayed were at best considered underground phenomena at the time. The Wu-Tang Clan, for example, were initially just a few hip-hop guys from Staten Island and not yet the lightest figures of a world-famous music style. And other of the artists portrayed were known, but their current importance at the time could not be assessed. “
