The New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2012. Photo Illustration by Idris Khan. 
                              
                              In November 2011, Kathy Ryan emailed to ask if I would be interested in making a series of images for a special photography issue about London to be published in the 2012 Olympic year.
                              
                              I had always wanted to make a body of work on the most celebrated tourist sights of London: The London Eye, Buckingham Palace, St Paul's, The Houses of Parliament and Tower Bridge. My work is about repetition, and I kept thinking about how many times these places had been photographed since photography existed. Billions. But for these images, I wanted to use found photography so I roamed the London streets and bought postcards from the many tourist shops/vendors and collected around a hundred different postcards for each piece. I then sourced some vintage images online to complete my collection. I wouldn't necessarily use the whole image to create the composite, but photograph different fragments and bring them together. By doing this it created an image of stretched time capturing the essence of the building in a poetic and rhythmical way.
                              
                              -Idris Kahn, Photographer
                              
                              I had been a huge admirer of Idris Khan's work for several years and had been hoping to commission him to do something for our magazine. I was lying in wait for just the right moment that would call for the abstract, impressionistic nature of his imagery, and when Hugo Lindgren decided we should do a photo issue on London, I knew this was our moment.
                              My thinking was that Idris would have the ability to reinvent the familiar look of London, so it was great to find out that he was interested in creating his own 'postcards' of London — images of the city's most famous landmarks, such as Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral and the London Eye. He would gather hundreds of existing images from the Internet and postcard shops around London and combine them into new, painterly Idris Khan pictures. This was perfect for us because it was a nice way to show the cliché landmarks of London in an entirely new way. And graphically, they added a nice note to the visual mix of the issue. When the London Eye photograph arrived, it was clearly a stunner, one for the ages. It announced itself as the cover from first sight.  -Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography, The New York Times Magazine