In 2018, I was invited by a private collector to develop a project that was both personal and conceptual. The request was simple in words but complex in execution: to capture the essence of New York City as seen from their rooftop. From that very spot, the skyline stretched outward in fragments, a shifting puzzle of glass, steel, and history. It wasn’t about creating just another cityscape. It was about transforming a personal view into an image that distilled the energy, the rhythm, and the meaning of the architecture itself.

From the rooftop, the city felt alive. Each building seemed to tell its own story of ambition, resilience, and identity. The skyscrapers stood like monuments to human drive, their forms both monumental and fragile, shaped by time and the endless pursuit of height. Looking through my lens, I felt as though I was not only photographing architecture, but also capturing the pulse of a city that never stops reinventing itself.

And happily discovering a pink building.

Technically, the project demanded precision. I worked with long telephoto lenses, 500mm and 600mm, to isolate details of the skyline. The distance compressed the buildings into layered compositions, but many were hidden, blocked, or incomplete from this particular vantage point. That challenge became part of the process. Through careful digital manipulation, I reconstructed what the eye could not see. Cleaning, reimagining, and rebuilding pieces of the skyline. Hours of post-production allowed me to reveal a vision of New York that was at once real and reconstructed, faithful and interpretive.

This project became much more than simple documentation. It turned into a dialogue between reality and imagination, where every frame was both an attempt and a question. I went through countless tries, countless moments where the photograph didn’t work, where I pressed delete and started again. Many of those images have never been shared, they remain private fragments of the process, quiet witnesses to the impossibility of fully capturing a city like New York. Yet those failures were not wasted; they carried me closer to the final vision.