Michael Moran, Long Island City, 2016. Location: Queens, New York. Gowanus, 2016. Location: Brooklyn, New York. Randall's Island, 2016. Location: New York City. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

One of the seminal images in photography was taken in 1928 by André Kertész in Meudon, a suburb of Paris. It shows a section of a narrow street bounded by three and four story buildings. The street slopes down to a construction site in the middle ground, which rises up to an enormously tall, arched viaduct, over which a locomotive passes, smoke spewing from its funnel. The composition draws the viewer’s eye in a direct line down from the locomotive to the buttress of the bridge (which seems to be under repair), then to the foreground, where a man crosses the street from left to right carrying a package (a painting?) wrapped in newsprint. He glances calmly at the photographer.
Almost everything that interests me can be found in this one photograph: the relationship of human beings to the scale of the city, awe inspiring feats of engineering, pictorial depth, the passage of time, and sound and atmosphere. I carried this image in my mind’s eye as I was taking the photographs in this exhibition.
My work has many influences (a few of which I describe below) and all of them relate to this photograph by Kertész.
I grew up on dam construction sites, impressed by the enormous dissonances of scale, by trucks, with tires four times as tall as a boy, crawling like ants on an earth dam a mile wide, the growl of machinery, the explosions, and the howl of the ventilation fans in the tunnels. My memories are triggered by the smell of dust and diesel fumes.
In 1984, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I saw Einstein on the Beach. I was stunned by the production design of Robert Wilson, the wonderful score by Philip Glass, the choreography of Lucinda Childs. That summer, in Los Angeles, I had seen the dances of Pina Bausch and the theater of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil. I had never seen theater at this scale and of this beauty before.
I am fascinated by:
The set designs of Dante Ferretti for the films of Federico Fellini, particularly City of Women with its garden wall that looks four stories high, and The Ship Sails On where we see tiny figures next to the slab side of an impossibly tall ship.
The relationship of human to architectural scale as well as the sculpting of space unbounded by glazing in the work of several architects that I have had the good fortune to document, including Frank Gehry, Rafael Moneo, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Shigeru Ban, and Enrique Norten.
The buildings of Le Corbusier. I am thinking particularly of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, with its swelling underbelly and thick legs, and the surreal acropolis of its roof, and the Mill Owners’ Association in Ahmedabad, especially the second floor with its thirty percent program and seventy percent exhilarating form and space, open to the air.
New York City, where I have lived and worked for thirty years. I feel at home with its scale and people, its cacophonous joy.