Source from NYTimes

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao loved documentary and street photography — until an internship at Magnum Photos led him to a sobering conclusion.

“You go through their contact sheets and it strikes you,” he said. “I was never going to be better.”

But he could be bigger.

Over the last 10 years Mr. Liao has produced a series of urban panoramas where he has married the precision and color of large-format film with the manipulations of digital processing (though more recently he has been using a custom-built medium format digital camera). The results — now on exhibit at the South Street Seaport Museum in Manhattan — are huge, intricate prints full of light, textures and a hyper-real perspective.

But a closer look will reveal impossible combinations of light and detail that could not be captured in a single exposure. Some of his images require multiple shots over a period of six hours or more. His recent digital work has him using a long lens to take “a couple of hundred” frames of scenes like Times Square where only a sliver of pedestrians are in sharp focus, while the backgrounds goes soft.

It is a world that exists solely in his mind — and in prints.

“It’s not real, but your brain says its real,” he said. “I am documenting a concept. It looks documentary. I love to see how an image can be seen on so many different levels by a viewer.”

Mr. Liao was born in Taiwan, raised in Vancouver and studied photography in New York. He lives in Jackson Heights — a dizzyingly diverse neighborhood that inspired his first major project, “Habitat 7,” consisting of panoramas shot along the route of the elevated train in Queens. He honed his method for approaching his cinematic urban landscapes.

Hauling about 50 pounds of gear — a view camera, film and a tripod — he divides a scene into three segments, then does as many as 10 exposures per segment. He then scans the film and manipulates it digitally. It demands a lot of advance preparation and planning. All told, it could take two weeks to make an image.

“You want to eat and breathe the same thing as people in a neighborhood,” he said. If I’m going to expose 30 sheets of 8-by-10 film, that’s expensive, and everything has to be right. So I go someplace first to get a feel for things, to calculate where I shoot, to see how the light hits and how it moves.”

Among his projects are a series on the old Shea Stadium and its successor, Citi Field, a commission by the Bronx Museum of the Arts to document the Grand Concourse and a personal project on Coney Island. He calls his current endeavor “The Manhattan Project,” which could apply either to its subject or its complexity.

Elisabeth Biondi, the former director of photography at The New Yorker, who curated the South Street show, said that while she grew up with traditional film photography — and its rules — Mr. Liao’s work showed some unexpected new directions.

“He is quite extraordinary,” she said. “It’s a true surprise. He has carried it further and further. What impresses me is he pushes it on and on. He makes it more complex.”

His next challenge is a commission by the Museum of the City of New York to document Staten Island. When he finishes, he will have compiled a panoramic collection of the five boroughs.

“This project is for New Yorkers,” he said. “I love New York. But in two years, I’m going back to Asia to make pictures there.”