HOW TO
LEAVE BROOKLYN
Two photographers collaborate on a book paying homage to the borough.
Story by CRAIG HUBERT
Photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb
are leaving Brooklyn. Or at least they are planning on
leaving sometime in the future. No firm plans have been
set. They came to Park Slope around 20 years ago, after
both having formerly lived in Manhattan and, at the
time, there were practical reasons for the relocation. “We
appreciate a more casual and neighborhood-oriented
borough, not to mention a place where several of our
friends—photographers, writers, and others involved in
the arts—live nearby,” says Alex. It was the first place the
couple lived together prior to getting married in 1999.
Looking into the future, though, they are open to
change. “A few years ago, we realized much as we love
Brooklyn, we’d like to spend the next chapter of our
lives in a place where the natural world dominates,” Alex
says, admitting that the choice has been complicated.
Memories remain. Rebecca, whose photos tend to focus
on landscape and the natural world, says she took some
of her first important photographs at the Coney Island
Aquarium in 1998, eventually leading to her first book,
“The Glass Between Us.” (Alex, on the other hand, a
street photographer and member of the Magnum photo
agency, embraces shifting colors and light, often in foreign
locations.) “So, for me, it’s been particularly hard to
say farewell to Brooklyn, this place I’ve long considered
my creative home,” Rebecca says.
When the idea came up to leave, they started thinking
about a collaborative project that would serve as the beginning
of a farewell, a way to “deal with this impending
departure—and the unsettling emotions that accompany
it,” Alex says. The result is “Brooklyn: The City Within,”
a photo book published by Aperture in September.
Split into three sections, the middle of the book focuses
on Rebecca’s photographs, mostly of Prospect Park, the
Botanic Garden and Green-Wood Cemetery, “because
the green heart where Rebecca has photographed lies
in the center of the borough,” they write in the introduction
to the book. It’s also where her interest in the
poetic possibilities of the natural world take shape: a
smudged shot of people trudging through Prospect Park
during a snowstorm; the glowing eyes of an animal—a
cat possibly, or maybe an owl—perched high in a thicket
of tree branches; a man and a woman tightly embracing
in the grass; crowds meandering through the bright red
and purple flowers of the Botanic Garden on a summer
day. In between these photographs, which, even when
people are present convey a solitariness, are texts written
by Rebecca. As in many of their recent collaborative
projects, these writings illuminate her more abstract
work. “Head bowed against this icy wind,” she writes
about a particularly harsh winter, “I wonder how many
of us now—this moment in Brooklyn—find ourselves
inhabiting two worlds at once?”
This other world, perhaps, is what Alex documents in
two different sections that bookend the project. He is
drawn to the multitude of people who inhabit Brooklyn’s
streets, from adults hurriedly exiting the subway to
their office jobs in Downtown Brooklyn to kids playing
outside their homes in Prospect Lefferts Gardens or
climbing a fence in Bath Beach. Dense with information,
his images are crowded and chaotic, demanding time to
pull apart their layers. The writer Geoff Dyer has called
Alex’s photos “complicated pictures of complicated
situations,” which accurately describes both their formal
properties and the content within the frame. He is drawn
to large gatherings—in the book, we get pictures from
the Mermaid Parade in Coney Island, Assumption Day
in Bushwick, J’ouvert in Crown Heights, and the Ragamuffin
Parade in Bay Ridge—as well as the way color,
sunlight, and reflection can alter what would otherwise
be a pedestrian image. The book brings to life the communities
around us, those we both see and don’t see, and
creates a portrait of home.
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