Guillaume Gaudet (photo) - PhotoCity New York

The sun has been up for an hour and already cycle commuters are pedalling across Brooklyn Bridges iconic suspended span over the East River to begin their working day in Manhattan. From the bridges boardwalk you can spy five other bridges and, in the distance, the Statue of Liberty welcoming huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Manhattans skyline, now with One World Trade Center ahead, never fails to thrill. Youll find photos of these iconic sights and more among these pages but this is a book about so much more than a tourism tick-list of New York Citys highlights.

Our ambition was to chronicle a day in the life of this greatest of cities from the perspective of a photographer who knows and loves it. We wanted to present not just the famous sights but also New Yorks daily rhythms as a local would experience them. The book is loosely organised according to the passage of a day and night in the city: we start with a ferry trip in dawns cool light, a coffee, and yoga at Bryant Park, and finish with a cocktail in a speakeasy-style bar then dancing in a nightclub. Along the way we follow the photographer on his peregrinations through New Yorks diverse neighbourhoods, exploring their signature experiences, from Wall St finance and Times Squares neon to skateparks, street art, neighbourhood basketball courts, delis and diners, and New Yorks great galleries and museums. It would be impossible to capture all of New York Citys incomparable variety but readers will discover its personality and personalities beyond the famous sights.

For a task of this scale, we sought a photographer for whom New York was more than just a home. Guillaume Gaudet who lives in Queens and specialises in travel, portraiture, interiors, lifestyle and fashion photography moved to New York in 2007 and fell in love with the city. This melting pot has become an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me, he says. Helping Guillaume was writer Zora ONeill, another Queens resident. Zora moved to New York in 1998, drawn by the citys energy and diversity. She has written for Lonely Planet since 2005, and she is the author of the travel memoir All Strangers Are Kin, about studying Arabic and travelling in the Middle East.

Between them, they photographed and described all these facets of New York life. The result is this chronologically-ordered visual odyssey through one of the worlds great cities, a taste of New York that may give first-time visitors fresh ideas of what to see and do, and also inspire long-time lovers of the metropolis to make another trip to The Big Apple.