Christoph Niemann’s “Spotted in New York City”

For the cover of the May 12 & 19, 2025, special issue about New York—our second issue commemorating the magazine’s hundredth anniversary, this year—we turned to Christoph Niemann, an artist who used to live in Brooklyn before relocating to Berlin. Niemann developed a series of images that reflect his former New York life while also riffing on old-fashioned newspaper halftone dots. “After a while, a place develops a character through the little things: routines; smells; a certain hue of the gray of the pavement,” he said. “Now when I come to New York, what makes me happy is not so much visiting a specific site but observing how these little things I recognize make me feel like I’m home.”