France, 1960
Carnets New-Yorkais is Jean-Christian Bourcart’s immersive, unfiltered dive into the city where he lived for many years. Newly arrived in New York in the late 1990s, he “made a living” producing corporate and showbiz images, clean, polished, seamless photography that, despite himself, contributed to the construction of a certain American dream, whose real name is capitalism. Very quickly, the gap between this controlled image and the America he experienced daily pushed him to seek another way of seeing.
Encouraged by the purchase of several of his prints by the MoMA and driven by an instinct for artistic survival, Bourcart began practicing a form of anti-photography; instinctive, raw, and torn from reality. With a small amateur camera, he photographed without premeditation whatever surrounded him: sidewalks, storefronts, crowds, parades, taxis, cinemas, traffic jams, underground clubs, slogans, the ruins of the World Trade Center, a world crossed, absorbed, questioned.
In Carnets New-Yorkais, New York is not represented; it is lived. The city appears shifting, porous, contradictory. The photographs oscillate between documentary and hallucinatory visions, capturing fragments of the real: bodies in motion, fleeting encounters, moments of tenderness or violence, while allowing the unconscious to surface.
This body of work is rooted in a pivotal era: the turn of the millennium, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, the subprime economic crisis. It would give rise to several major series, Traffic, Forbidden City, and Stardust, now widely exhibited and published. Nearly a thousand sheets of these albums remained for eighteen years in a basement, until their rediscovery and acquisition by the Musée Nicéphore Niépce.
With Carnets New-Yorkais, Bourcart continues his reflection on desire, solitude, and shared human condition. The work rejects the idea of a fixed or iconic New York; it reveals a city in perpetual metamorphosis one that shapes, unsettles, and absorbs those who inhabit it. The one hundred sheets presented here, drawn from a corpus of more than a thousand, form a raw, sensitive, deeply human visual notebook, where the personal merges with the collective, and where each image still seems ready to be rewritten.
