Tom de Peyret got into trouble when he was little. His father, who gave him his first camera when he was 7, was a proofreader in the written press. He took the opportunity to drag his sneakers to several Parisian newspaper printing presses, including the one in Worldabout twenty years ago. He kept some, he said, “a romantic nostalgia”. Thus, when the opportunity arose to delve into the bowels of the presses of the New York Timesin September 2018, he obviously jumped at the opportunity. At that time he was at a fashion photo shoot in Manhattan and with a beating heart the 38-year-old photographer went to discover it. “a city within a city”, in College Point, central Queens.
Taxis don’t know the way. Just across the street is the LaGuardia Airport runway. A little further away, a marine training center and intertwined highways that lead to the Big Apple, but also the tennis courts of Flushing Meadows, the silhouette of the real estate projects that made Donald Trump’s father a fortune… And, in the middle of the East River, Rikers Island, the famous penitentiary center through which powerful people and various celebrities have passed, such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Christophe Rocancourt and Harvey Weinstein, among others.
The printing press of the most famous newspaper in the world is surrounded by inaccessible places of power, “a strong symbol of a place of information production”underlines Tom de Peyret, who wrote a book about it, 1 New York Times Plaza, Queens, New York 11356 (Persecution Editions). Of course, we are talking about reels of paper that move at full speed on rails and numerous floors to produce 80,000 newspapers per hour. But also ink and lubricating oil, steel and bricks.
Guaranteed independence
Charlie Chaplin could have easily transformed the place into a movie set. “It is a gigantic factory, a kind of ordered chaos that, however, sees its flow slow down as the years go by.says the photographer. Enough to leave us perplexed, since the end of the printed object and the professions that surround it seems inevitable, in favor of digital technology. » This is the success of the American newspaper today: thanks to its 11 million online subscribers (an audience that increased after Donald Trump’s first election, in 2016), the paper version no longer depends on the results of the broadcast or from advertising and, therefore, sees its Independence guaranteed.
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