What time is it? What season are we in? Jean-Michel Berts' photographs escape time. A supernatural light wraps the sky, the majestic buildings and light spread off at every crossroads. The abstraction of characters reanimates the city's timelessness with an incredible emotional density.
Jean-Michel Berts tells a geometric, fantastic and nostalgic story of New York : the Empire State Building in its ghostly greatness, the romance of the Manhattan Bridge. All iconic images arouse the memory of an exile and exude the insatiable ambition of New York. New York holds its breath and its hectic crowd to coil in an armored silver sky. In quiet rest, its picturesque neighborhoods emerge: here, emblematic Porto Rico on Bleecker Street; there, the old-fashioned and unexpected of a drowsy Canal Street. This ballad does not stay silent. A luscious music leads every step with the Blossom Dearie refrain "I'll take Manhattan," or with E.B White's words in Here is New York, where, "each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer..."

The richness of Jean-Michel Berts photographs also comes from his technique. He uses the method of Ansel Adams called The Zone System. With an exposure time between nine seconds and ten minutes, this method of overexposing negatives and under-developing them allows a strong density, enhancing the contrast in black and white.