Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong

From Architecture and Urban Studies to a Scale of Seeing — Elevation, Distance, and Large-Format Photography

Leong was born in Mexico City; his current official website identifies him as a visual artist holding Mexican, British, and American citizenship^*1. His education at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University focused on architecture and the city, and that training remains visible in the way he photographs. In an interview about Cities, Leong explains that when he enters a new city, he first studies the arrangement of streets and buildings, the natural topography, and layers of history in three dimensions. He then translates that complexity and extent onto the two-dimensional photographic surface^*15. He also explains the elevated viewpoint as a way to grasp the city’s arrangement almost like a map while photography retains light, form, color, and space^*15. An opportunity to teach at Peking University led to an extended period in China and allowed him to observe the rapid urban reconstruction of the early 2000s over time. The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation discusses his large-format record of vast housing developments replacing historic urban districts^*2. Photography can fix a broad area at once and layer light, color, building materials, and traces of daily life onto a maplike overview. The viewer can move repeatedly between the distant view and fine detail within the same image.

China’s Urban Transformation in the 2000s — Repeating the View Across Cities

Around 2002, when History Images began, the removal of old urban districts and the construction of new residential and commercial areas were proceeding simultaneously across major Chinese cities. Storefront for Art and Architecture records that Leong approached the city as a place where urban erasure and new development were happening at the same time, building a New York exhibition from large-format color photographs made from distant viewpoints^*3. Steidl’s description of the photobook likewise emphasizes photographs of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, Pingyao, Xiamen, and other cities made with a large-format view camera, holding the enormous scale of urban change and the small scale of individual life in the same frame^*4. Repeating a similar viewing distance across several cities sets common patterns of transformation alongside local differences. MoMA’s inclusion of photographs of Chinese cities in the 2006 exhibition Landscape: Recent Acquisitions, together with contemporary landscape work, also shows the series being read through both urban study and landscape photography^*10.

History Images — Empire, Socialism, and the Market Economy in a Single Frame

History Images brings architecture from several historical periods at a single urban site into the same frame. Material from Yossi Milo’s 2006 exhibition describes Xinjiekou, Xuanwu District, Nanjing as a view in which remnants of imperial-era houses, partially demolished socialist housing, and new towers of the market economy layer the foreground, middle ground, and distance like geological strata^*11. In SFMOMA’s Yihaoqiao, Yuzhong District, Chongqing, traces of construction and demolition extend across the wide image^*7. Tiananmen, Dongcheng District, Beijing treats Tiananmen and its surroundings as part of an urban structure, preserving the spatial relationships among monuments, roads, and buildings^*8. Photography of China describes the series as recording the disappearance of an older history at the same time that a new history is being produced^*19. The physical coexistence of several periods within one photograph becomes the series’ way of rendering time.

Why Large Format and Distance? — Keeping the Whole City and the Laundry on the Same Negative

Combining a distant viewpoint with an 8×10 view camera allows Leong to keep the overall city and minute detail in the same photograph. Steidl describes History Images as a high-density image in which the immense scale of urban transformation and the minute scale of the individual can be read simultaneously^*4. In MoMA’s Pingyao, Shanxi Province, the roofs and roads of the historic city continue across the same surface as construction in the distance^*9. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston describes Xinjiekou, Xuanwu District, Nanjing through the layered presence of imperial-era housing remains, partially demolished socialist apartment blocks, and a new market-era tower, again likening the image to geological strata^*18. Laundry, windows, temporary structures, and human figures remain legible within the distant view, allowing the institutional scale of urban transformation and the scale of individual life to be compared on the same negative.

Horizons — Holding the Horizon Steady Across Distant Places

Horizons is an ongoing project begun in 2001. Leong photographs natural landscapes, cities, seas, deserts, and glaciers while keeping the position of the horizon almost constant within the frame. The New Yorker describes his use of an 8×10 view camera and his treatment of the horizon as a reference line when three-dimensional space is translated into a two-dimensional photograph^*13. The National Galleries of Scotland describes its 2007 Amman as part of a series linked by a common horizon and designed so the order of photographs can be rearranged^*26. Polka Galerie’s project page confirms that geographically and functionally different places—Mexico City, Cairo, Varanasi, Lisbon, Tokyo, Inner Mongolia, and others—are joined by the same horizontal line, and that the series has been produced primarily with an 8×10 camera and analog chromogenic prints^*22. When roads, icebergs, industrial zones, housing, and coastlines occupy the same height, differences in terrain, architecture, atmosphere, and light become conspicuous. Because the order can be rearranged, geographically distant places become adjacent along a shared horizon.

Cities — Reading Urban Blocks and Everyday Detail from Above

In Cities, Leong photographs cities around the world from elevated positions, showing large divisions such as roads, blocks, housing districts, and industrial areas while retaining laundry, deliveries, graffiti, and human movement. TIME identifies the coexistence of urban planning’s geometric patterns and the details of daily life in the same image as a defining feature of the series^*14. In an interview with The Morning News, Leong likewise describes searching for a distance from which a city can be seen as a whole while its internal life remains available for close reading^*15. The Met holds Luohu District, Shenzhen (2008), a large chromogenic print of Shenzhen’s urban landscape^*21. Read alongside the museum’s La Paz (2010), the series’ geographic range becomes concrete: cities on different continents are compared through a consistent photographic and print scale^*20. Place names remain in the titles, so each location retains its specificity within the comparative structure.

Reading in Series — Sequence Creates the Comparison

Repetition and juxtaposition determine how Leong’s three major series are read. Horizons holds the height of the horizon; Cities repeats the elevated viewpoint; History Images maintains distance and a high density of detail across changing locations. Reviewing an exhibition of Horizons, Collector Daily notes that photographs with nearly constant proportions of sky and ground begin to resemble “units” within a shared format, making differences inside each landscape more pronounced^*16. The Hatje Cantz photobook Horizons carries the pages forward along the same horizontal axis^*6. Steidl’s History Images similarly edits photographs from multiple Chinese cities into a single book-length sequence^*5. Exhibition and photobook become structures that generate comparison among places.

Why Photography? — Combining the Overview of a Map with the Light and Detail of a Place

Leong describes urban photography as a problem of translating a three-dimensional city into two dimensions. An elevated image approaches the informational range of a map while retaining the color of roads, the materials of buildings, the direction of light, and the movement of people on site^*15. This dual capacity gives photography information that differs from an architectural drawing or urban statistics. In History Images, the heights of buildings, the density of blocks, and layers of depth can be read together as layers of urban history; in Cities, zoning and the details of everyday life occupy the same image. In his 2018 Rome Prize project, Leong again described choosing elevated positions beyond the habitual street-level view in order to see the environment as a whole and understand where people stand within a larger world^*25. Photography fixes a broad space at once and layers light, color, construction materials, and traces of life onto a maplike overview. Viewers can move between distance and detail at their own pace.

Cities Brought Close by a Common Format — Difference Persists in Architecture, Vegetation, and Everyday Life

Leong’s serial method makes different places appear structurally similar. In Horizons, the horizon crosses each photograph at the same level; in Cities, urban blocks appear as geometric patterns from above. Each work nevertheless retains its place name in the title, while road surfaces, building ages, light, vegetation, signage, and human behavior remain recorded in the details. Collector Daily points to both the moment when landscapes begin to look interchangeable under a shared format and the moment when their internal differences become emphatic^*16. Princeton University Art Museum’s Jiangsheng Cun, Shanxi Province is likewise preserved as a specific site, with its place name, 2004 date, and printing process explicitly recorded^*17. The closer locations appear under the common format, the more distinctions in architecture, vegetation, signage, and behavior emerge as the viewer follows the details.

After New Topographics and Gursky — Using Large-Format Photography for Cross-City Comparison

Leong’s large-format color photographs can be read against two histories: post-1970s landscape photography that analyzes human-altered environments and the museum-scale color photography that occupied increasingly large walls during the 1990s. SFMOMA situates the 1975 exhibition New Topographics as a turn from sublime natural scenery toward industrial zones, suburbs, and ordinary built landscapes, informed by Conceptual Art and Minimalism^*23. The Met identifies large scale, technical precision, and the photography of global social spaces as points shared by Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth^*24. Leong also works with cities, development, and global movement at large scale, while repeating a specific photographic rule across multiple sites: the height of the horizon in Horizons, the elevated viewpoint in Cities, and the density of distance and detail in History Images. Yossi Milo’s material on Cities explains that a consistent viewpoint, composition, and descriptive precision bring similarities and differences among the social and historical structures of different cities to the foreground^*12. In Leong’s large-format photographs, fine detail communicates the scale of one place and also furnishes material for comparison with another city photographed under the same rule. Difference appears in the age of buildings, the density of blocks, and traces of everyday life.