After the slog of commuting and working on a New York summer day, walking outside into the light of the golden hour can be a salve in itself. That fleeting period of time—shortly before the sun sets, or after it rises, when shadows grow longer and everything appears to glow—lends us an opportunity to reconsider the world around us, recast in warm color. To mark the seventieth anniversary of Magnum Photos, The New Yorker asked the storied agency’s photographers, who were in town, last week, for their annual meeting, to capture New York City during the evening golden hour. The physical distance between the resulting photographs, a few of which were taken on days when the weather yielded more blue light than gold, is quietly underscored by the emotional distance in them: in Midtown, a lone white-haired man walks an empty road, bowing toward the sun, while Pride Parade revellers in the West Village seem to welcome the oncoming night. Viewed together, these images offer a portrait of the city in the vanishing light of long summer evenings. “In my mind,” the Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael told me, “sometimes the shadows the light casts are more interesting than the light itself.”
