Williamsburg, Brooklyn

I have now made six walks through Williamsburg, Brooklyn since hunkering down with my family. Maintaining distance from others has been easy given that there are few people in the streets. It is an eerie feeling – as if I have the whole city to myself. Other than the emptiness, there are only a few signs that the city is in distress. An artist has stenciled some relevant messages. People line up for supermarkets and pharmacies, which are limiting the number of patrons at any one time. Lots of people are wearing masks.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

I am calling my new (unwelcome) project Williamsburg, Brooklyn – In Time of Plague. I have thought of photographing the neighborhood before but always rejected the idea because I didn’t feel I had an angle or overarching narrative that made sense. I don’t, generally, do random documentations of places. I need some sort of conceptual basis, a germinative idea, or a historical imperative. I have that now.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

What I hope to accomplish is a series of photographs that freezes this neighborhood at a particular moment in time with all the pictures made over a period of just a few weeks. It will be a portrait of Williamsburg – a place that conjures many different preconceptions – most of which are wrong. Despite a wave of gentrification, especially on the Manhattan side of the neighborhood, it remains an extremely diverse quarter of New York. The juxtapositions of new and old, rich and poor, residential and industrial, are often jarring, unexpected. Graffiti seems to have taken over every untended surface. It is visually a fascinating place where beauty is often found camouflaged in a rough and tumble urban landscape.