74
in the book, whose first line arose from walking along
Long Meadow at dusk when the street lights were coming
on.
Are you thinking of your pictures of Brooklyn as being in
dialogue with those that came before?
AW: If one photographs a place, almost inevitably one
becomes aware of the weight of past photographs.
However, the images that I particularly remember
of Brooklyn are largely in black and white, ranging
from the work of Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and
Garry Winogrand, to more recent images from Eugene
Richards, Bruce Gilden, and Thomas Roma. As a color
photographer now for some 40 years, photographing
Brooklyn in color has seemed like unexplored territory.
RNW: Besides my work being in dialogue with Helen
Levitt, Saul Leiter, and other lyrical New York City street
photographers, it’s also in conversation with the rich
literary tradition of Brooklyn, notably Marianne Moore,
who lived in Fort Greene, where the younger poet,
Elizabeth Bishop, would sometimes visit her mentor.
Many of us Brooklynites are acquainted with the rather
odd-looking tree near the boathouse in Prospect Park,
which looks like an oversized bonsai tree—the Camperdown
elm. About 50 years ago, Moore wrote a poem
to raise awareness and funds to save the struggling elm.
Both the Camperdown elm and her poem— engraved on
a plaque nearby—endure.
As longtime residents, did anything surprise you about
Brooklyn while working on this project?
AW: Brooklyn is huge and varied, so there are large
expanses of the borough that I— even as a longtime
resident—still know little about. So for me, the process
of photographing Brooklyn was exploratory and
occasionally revelatory. One summer in Bushwick, I
was delighted when a Mexican family invited me in for
tamales during an Assumption Day festival. At a street
fair in Park Slope, I was astonished to come upon a sea
of bubbles. During J’ouvert—a festival that begins at 4
a.m. before the West Indian Day Parade during Labor
Day weekend—the surreal scene of oil-covered revelers
transported me back to Grenada’s Carnival, which I’d
photographed many years before.
RNW: The day after learning that my friend, Diana Willensky
Thompson, had died—the daughter of the former
Rebecca Norris Webb, ‘Midsummer Festival,’ Prospect Park, 2017.