The photographs of Reiner Leist’s Window series offer a perspective on 20 years of New York City life. Since March 1995, the artist has captured almost daily the view from the window of his apartment, in an office building on Manhattan’s 8th Avenue. On the left is corporate tower One Penn Plaza, across the street from Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden; on the right, the aging New Yorker Hotel; and in the distance, amid countless skyscrapers, the World Trade Center, as it once was, and is today. Leist’s long-term conceptual study is both a personal diary of the artist and an unsuspecting witness to a historical turning point.
Today, more than 4,500 photographs have accrued, produced with 8×10 film and two antique large-format cameras. We show this epic work via three exemplary image series, each a cyclical compilation representing the 14th, 30th and 31st days of one month from 1995 to 2015.

Reiner Leist (*1964) studied fine art and photography in Munich, Cape Town and New York City. From 1988 to 1994, Leist lived in South Africa.  From 2000 to 2003, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He currently lives and works in Manhattan, as a professor of fine art at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His work has been exhibited at locations including Stadthaus Ulm, the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.