THE MAGIC OF MELANCHOLY: Guido Magnaguagno

Is New York a city of melancholy, as are Lisbon and Prague, Havana or Rio de Janeiro? It is at any rate a city of many faces. Perhaps the city per se – Metropolis, Megalopolis, a Moloch. Often written about, often photographed. Different from all other cities, larger, higher, faster. Manhattan the myth, the legend. With a sworn insular population, for richer and for poorer joined in daily survival. Can cities be melancholic? Perhaps when their heydays are irrevocably over and history flakes out of their patina? Yet New York –does it grant the visitor time and space for this feling? The pulsating rhythm of life and the mental state circumscribed with this slow and heavy word "melancholy" seem to be irreconcilable opposites. A metropolis versus a sentiment – out of this tension René Groebli created his New York photographs.

It is a common experience for man to feel loneliest in the largest congregations. The anonymity of the city is a much-cited metaphor, virtually a symbol of human existence in the twentieth century, of which the great novels of our time speak extensively. This basic feeling – to experience the pain of alienation in the center of the world stage of all places – flickers as an archetypal symbol through the cultural history of our modern times; the dissonance between boundless freedom and abysmal despair marks the existential experience of the city dweller. When in 1978, René Groebli went to New York for two months and took a room on the 22nd floor of the "Hotel Holland" on 42nd Street, he did so with neither assignment nor clear intention.

He knew the city well from his almost yearly visits on jobs – but this time, he exposed himself to the town without the safety lines of appointments and acquaintances. For two months, he roamed the street canyons and backyards, and when one looks at the pictures he took there, one gets the impression he never talked to anyone during those days and nights, the camera his only companion. This lonely adventure occurred at the time when his extremely successful advertising career had finally lost its inner meaning. After decades of commissioned photography, he turned back to his artistic beginnings – [...] At long last, he used his camera again to express his feelings. [...]

 After [about a decade] of photographic "silence" only did he find back to his old passion and made his lab his new favorite place, where he found a different kind of solitude, one of concentration and devotion. He pulled out the old, yet untreated negatives, first the railway, then Ireland and lastly New York. In his inimitable way he treated, enlarged and composed them into his proper pictorial language. The portfolio N. Y. MELANCHOLIA comprises the reworking in 1996 and 1997 of the visual experiences and emotional states of 1978. Apparently, distance was essential. To tell us of his New York experience, he chose forty-three pictures. He mostly arranged them in trilogies in order to heighten the expression and to strengthen the visual impact. Groebli's New York is black, as of the night, twilit, dimmed – street lights, car lights and lit windows fight against fog and rain. And it is without human beings. They appear, if at all, as mere shadows. No word, no link, no touch. The debate is between the city itself – its houses, streets and cars – and the lonely wanderer with his camera. In between: Nothing. It is autumn, the season of melancholy, and one feels its gloomy, somber odor in all forty-three photos, as if their grain was musty and damp. New York's street canyons are inhospitable – every man for himself, hidden behind doors and windows or in cars. A city as shelter at best.

Excerpt from an essay published in the portfolio N.Y.Melancholia, self-published by René Groebli in 1999