Tom de Peyret observes the inner workings of power. Behind the shine of glossy facades, into the meanders of silent infrastructures. A barely recognizable New York City is sometimes outlined in the shape of a bridge, a faraway skyscraper, or the logo of the New York Times — whose presses he surveys, along the alleyways of their Queens printing plant. This book avoids postcard mise-en-scènes to scrutinize the city’s own anonymous pedestal; the structure which grants the capital its daily role, as the Empire’s unofficial epicenter.

Much like writer Philippe Vasset, Tom de Peyret sneaks into off-record zones, areas solely charted as non-lieus. Through oblique excursions across New York City, he explores inaccessible, forbidden or disused places From military grounds in construction to prisons and airports, his odyssey also unveils, as a reflection, the insides of the New York Times’s printing presses. There, an almost archaic form of the newspaper is being printed, to be read a few hours later in fancy hotel lobbies, airport terminals or international public libraries — distributed by the same trucks driving down the highway interchanges of the Five Boroughs.

This book takes us behind the city’s scenes. Replicating the paper’s overlaid, slightly offset ink layers, Tom de Peyret reminds us that New York is first and foremost an intricately engineered, centrifugal machinery — one that delivers information, goods and capital.