My work reveals, before all else, a particular appreciation of urban history and, more specifically, a recognition that the passing of time is relative, and mutable, in big cities. I am drawn to old architecture, to buildings erected in an era when greater care was taken in the choice of building materials, and in the ways in which those materials were handled and finished. And I am drawn to the frankly romantic, even mystic, dimension of great cities—which are places of struggle and growth, but also of wonderment and ever-unfolding engagement. They are places were it is all too easy to get lost, but where it is also possible to find oneself—and, in that process, develop a lifelong love of city life and its denizens.

I am especially fascinated with the city in its rare moments of tranquility—as it sinks into slumber, as it rouses itself to face a new day. At such times the city is all abstraction—looming shapes, diffused light, spectral shadows. In these moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelops even the most mundane street scenes… and my work aims to capture that ineluctable quality.

I trained as a painter, and then began creating collages into which I incorporated my own photographs. My current work draws on all of that prior experience, although in my photographic images I am, in effect, reversing the process that I used in making collages—by turning the photographic images themselves into collages. I digitally layer textures over the original image. This process of superimposing the old on the new serves as a metaphor for my wider conceptual interests, because my newest works—which are hushed and introspective, and which can be touched with melancholy—are, ultimately, reflections of the past, of my past, and of the passage of time.

Marc Yankus