Tom de Peyret fell into his photography career as a child. His father, who gave him his first camera at the age of 7, was a proofreader in the print media. He took advantage of this position to hang out in several Parisian newspaper printing plants, including Le Monde, some 20 years ago. He has retained from this, he said, "a romantic nostalgia." So, when the opportunity arose to dive into the depths of the New York Times presses, in September 2018, he jumped at the chance. At the time, he was working on a fashion shoot in Manhattan, and it was with a pounding heart that the 38-year-old photographer went to discover "a city within a city," at College Point, in central Queens.

Cabs don't know the way. Across the street is the runway of LaGuardia Airport. A little further on, there's a Marine Corps training center, and interlacing expressways leading to the Big Apple, but there are also the Flushing Meadows tennis courts and the silhouette of the real estate projects that made Donald Trump's father's fortune... In the middle of the East River, there is Rikers Island too – the famous penitentiary that has hosted various powerful people and celebrities such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Christophe Rocancourt, and Harvey Weinstein, among others.

The printing plant of the world's most famous newspaper is surrounded by inaccessible infrastructures of power, "a strong symbol for a place where information is produced," pointed out de Peyret, who has written a book about it, 1 New York Times Plaza, NY 11356 (Poursuite Editions). Admittedly, the story is all about reels of paper speeding along rails and up many flights of stairs to put out 80,000 newspapers an hour. But it's also about ink and lubricating oil, steel, and bricks.

Guaranteed independence

Charlie Chaplin could easily have turned the place into a movie set. "It's a gigantic factory, a sort of ordered chaos that nevertheless is seeing its output slow down over the years," said the photographer. "This is a sobering thought, given that the end of the printed object and the trades that go with it seem inevitable, to the advantage of digital technology." It's the latter that is now key to the success of the American daily: thanks to its 11 million online subscribers – an audience that surged in the wake of Trump's first election in 2016 – the paper version is no longer dependent on circulation scores or advertising, and its independence is therefore guaranteed.

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