Magic City: Navjot Altaf and Ram Rahman

What keeps New York City alive? The city changes, and does so fast – it is a protagonist in its own story and a chameleon to boot. It can be best thought of as neighbourhoods cobbled together with ever-shifting borders – cultural, financial, based on real estate and favourite coffee shops. Even Times Square is not immune. New York is a surrealist’s fever dream come true.

Ram Rahman’s Manhattan Sirens, in which images of store mannequins are framed by window-reflections of NYC’s streets where winter light and bare trees combine with NYC’s distinct water towers and architecture to tease the surrealism of mannequins in their perfection judging their viewers. Manhattan as told through the eyes of commerce, real estate, and architecture – its basis for being a trading port, home of Wall Street and major cultural institutions and museums. Encapsulating that fervent pace are Rahman’s photographs – frozen in their time, and still offering a respite as only NYC can, in the stillness of a shop-window while musing about possibilities posed by the window’s content and reflections. We are all looking in, and upon the shining city on a hill – sometimes/oftentimes excluded by the extremes inherent in this city.

Navjot Altaf’s A Place in New York, in process an anthropological series of interviews with NYC residents about their relationship to the city, creates a dialogue between the richness and heterodoxy of the city which make it so vital. Photomontages offer the complexity of layered meanings, carving out the city’s stories upon the monuments and street corners alike, an imprint of the people who call it home one way or another. “The city is there in its monumental edifices and sculptures, no doubt, but also emerges through its cracks, resides in its concrete, lingers on its park benches. The city is located in its liminal spaces–staircases, train stations and bridges–spaces of travel, transition and in-betweeness, the neither here nor there where much of urban life unfolds. It straddles both, interiors and exteriors, bridging public and private spaces and selves” – Uzma Z. Rizvi

gaze at my world, Manhattan— / my buildings, streets I’ve done feats in, / lofts, beds, coldwater flats
(from “My Sad Self” by Allen Ginsberg)

New York City, however, is not unique, but it is imperfect. Like all other big cities NYC lives its many, many versions of itself both simultaneously and incongruently across its many communities. In 2025, this city with all its problems, possibilities and imperfections remains a sanctuary.  Together, Rahman and Altaf offer two views into its enduring appeal.

Renuka Sawhney and Ram Rahman
November 2025