72
graphed elsewhere. But instead of traveling by airplane, I
simply took the subway.
RNW: Certain landscapes call to me, especially in places
where I’ve lived or spent considerable time in, including
most notably South Dakota, the sparsely populated
state on the Great Plains where I came of age. That’s
where I worked on my third book that interweaves my
photographs and spare text, “My Dakota,” a kind of road
trip of my grief for my brother who died unexpectedly.
My response to the first death of an immediate family
member was to drive restlessly through the badlands
and prairies of South Dakota, the only place that gave
me solace during the darkest time of my grief.
Walking and photographing Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Botanic Garden, and Green-Wood Cemetery was not
only about photographing the green spaces that I love
near our Park Slope neighborhood. It also allowed me to
return to my street photography roots, particularly the
work of Bensonhurst-born Helen Levitt, a contemporary
of Walker Evans, James Agee, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
When I first moved to New York from the Great Plains
some 30 years ago to study at the International Center of
Photography, I was inspired by the work of Levitt, one
of the first women street photographers, especially her
spontaneous photographs of children at play. No surprise
that Levitt makes an appearance in one of my text pieces
Alex Webb, Borough Park, 2016.
“When we first got together, we thought the idea of
collaboration would be anathema,” Alex said at a recent
presentation of the book in Manhattan. “We thought
it would be the end of the relationship. Obviously, that
changed.” What helped was that, among all their travels
and the thousands of rolls of film that passed through
their analog cameras, there was always a place to return
to. In a piece included in the book, Rebecca writes of
flying over Brooklyn at night on their way back from a
trip. “Adrift in all that luminance, Prospect Park passes
beneath us like a great dark ship, built of ironwood,
hornbeam, scarlet oak,” she writes. “In its wooden hold, I
know that we are home.”
Your methods of how you approach taking pictures in
Brooklyn seem to differ. Can you talk about those different
approaches and how that is reflected in the book?
AW: Ever since my early trips to Haiti and the U.S.-
Mexico border nearly 45 years ago, I’ve often been drawn
to cultures outside of my own, especially those from Latin
American and the Caribbean. Photographing in these
places—where intense light and vibrant color seem almost
embedded in the culture—led to my switching from
black and white to color. While working on “Brooklyn:
The City Within,” although I photographed all over the
borough, I repeatedly found myself attracted to some of
the same Latin and Caribbean cultures that I’d photo-