Jiri Makovec's Unique View of New York April 28, 2012, 5:00 am For five years, Jiri Makovec, 35, a Czech photographer, stranded himself on an island. "For me, New York City is like an island apart from the rest of the U.S.," he said. Anytime I've been somewhere else in this country, I felt it was very different from New York. He never left the city from 2004 to 2009. He supported himself by cleaning and painting and taking on other jobs while biking New York with his Hasselblad and plenty of film. Mr. Makovec combined 58 of his favorite shots into a collection, "From the Island." The pictures have a surreal character, as if conceived as a strange art project and then painstakingly posed and lighted. Actually, all were captured as is. Unlike a typical journalist, Mr. Makovec often stayed at a distance from his subject. His shot of a cab engulfed in flames on an empty street near the Plaza Hotel could have been your basic spot news shot. But the wide angle, with sidewalk sculptures in the foreground, makes the burning cab off in the distance seem almost incidental. A cab is burning - does the city care? Mr. Makovec was not trying to get to the bottom of what was happening on a literal level. At a crime scene strangely canopied by cherry trees in full bloom, he never even got off his bicycle - as in most of these pictures. "When I saw something interesting and striking, I snapped it," he said. If you start to ask questions first, the picture is ruined. He has a point. That man kneeling on the sidewalk, wearing red clothes and makeup: Does it enhance the viewing to know he was an artist conducting a tea ceremony on Rivington Street, or does it deflate it? Follow Lens and Corey Kilgannon on Twitter.