I grew up in New York City, in Southeast Queens, and I would have to take a bus and a subway to come into Manhattan. Starting at about age 13 or 14, I was allowed to go into Manhattan on my own, and I often ended up in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Still to this day, fifty years later, I have not seen everything in the Museum, but it’s always a joy to come and explore. Each room, each gallery, is a whole other world, it’s worlds within worlds. You can go from one world to another and sometimes you can shoot from one world to another, creating a dialogue between the space and the art and the people looking at the art in the space.
Metropolitan Museum, NYC © Harvey Wang
For this photograph, I was aiming my camera into Engelhart Court in the American Wing, where the light is always amazing. Compositionally, there were things in the frame in sharp focus that referred to other things that could be seen in the reflections. I was drawn to the multiple layers that could be seen. We are looking from a work of Renaissance armor to a nineteenth century American sculpture, and we’re seeing a contemporary couple, a dad with his daughter, and she is looking at him and it is like the whole history of the world, of civilization, is right here. It’s sort of beautiful to have all that contained in one image.
