A recent job had me creating new images for the stellar, human rights activist and radical feminist Farah Tanis. Cool, minimal design by Betta Lang. Check out the new site here. Check out some of her projects including a museum in Crown Heights devoted to promoting Transnational and Black Feminist histories and traditions as well as this activist…
Category: Brooklyn
Two Brooklynites experience Timkat, The Ethiopian “Day of Epiphany”.
Two Brooklynites do Timkat by Nina Granados (Nina and I travelled together for two weeks in Northern Ethiopia in January of 2015 when I was working there on a Getty Images/Lean-In.org grant.) Most of us westerners have a romanticization towards what is foreign from our daily scraps of living in an industrialized landscape. For a…
Carnival in Crown Heights
Decided this year to skip J’Ouvert the folkloric musical procession that opens the West Indian Labor Day festivities and just stroll Eastern Parkway, meandering through the almost 2 million attendees. The smell of bad weed, BBQ and sweat is omnipresent, as is the incredible costumes which root from each of the island’s cultural traditions.
J’Ouvert in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. New York City’s greatest folkloric festival.
All Text from “J’ouvert in Brooklyn Carnival: Revitalizing Steel Pan and Ole Mas Traditions”. Author: Ray Allen “The rumble of distant drums rolls across Prospect Park, breaking the pre-dawn tranquility that envelops central Brooklyn on Labor Day morning.My watch says 4 a.m.-the J’Ouvert celebration must be underway. Quietly slipping out of my apartment into the cool of…
J’Ouvert, 2014
My favorite day of the year has come and gone again. I swore this year I wouldn’t shoot like the last three years. I wanted to just experience it instead of trying to capture it visually, mathematically. I wanted to stay in the moment. Well, its hard to do after 20 years of working and…
Sky Garden, A much needed Crown Heights oasis.
The roof on my 8 family 4-story Pre-War Apartment in Crown Heights has been a place to garden, eat and chill for the last couple years. We used to garden in the huge, un-used backyard space but found that it’s north facing position with some big trees didn’t allow enough light to grow food ( it also…
Sakura Matsuri in Brooklyn: Where cherry blossoms, Cosplay, Autism and acne finally intersect.
The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens had their Cherry Blossom Festival last weekend and the Cosplay (costume play) that transpired was much more vibrant and colorful than the trees themselves (they actually have yet to bloom). I wandered around in jaw dropped amazement at this sub-cultures breadth and was shocked to see how its practitioners sat so comfortable in what seemed to…
Pesach at the ER…one mans idiotic exodus into the American Medical System.
Passover on Monday night was pretty incredible. Intimate gathering of 10 people lead by an ex-Chasid turned globetrotting DJ, great crowd, raucous singing, bottomless wine, delicious food, topped off by a tipsy daredevil bike ride with an old Jackson Hole snowboarding buddy in for the weekend and $1 slices. Signing autographs as Bruce Willis to drunken…
PS 58 Auction 2014 at the Bell House
Here is a slideshow of the images from the PS 58 Auction at the Bell House. Photos by local photographer Joshua Kristal. Peruse the blog if your interested in dwarfs dressed up as druids at Stonehenge, the lives and culture of Peru or interesting looks into several subcultures of New York. Joshua
The Satmars take Crown Heights.
Living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn one runs into the Lubavitch/Chabad Jewish community regularly as its their spiritual headquarters. 770 Eastern Parkway, a couple blocks from me, is where their Grand Rebbe/Messiah, Rebbe Schneerson, lived and worked for the 50 odd years. This sect of Hasidic Jews are Kabbalists and celebrate life at every opportunity (they seem…
Bike Kill of Brooklyn
“TAKE a dash of “Mad Max,” add a pinch of “Jackass,” sprinkle both over a wet batter of art students, bicycle messengers, anarchist welders and militant anti-globalist vegans, then let the mixture bake for, say, a decade in the oven of Brooklyn, and the resulting dish should taste a little like the Black Label Bike…
Hip-Hop show with my neighbors in Brooklyn
This summer I joined my neighbors to a hip-hop contest/showcase in Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn (which birthed many icons of the genre-Jay-Z, Mos Def, Big Daddy Kane, Biggie Smalls, etc..). There were 15 different acts who played two songs each, the winner getting a free recording session in my neighbors basement recording studio. Camo was trending, the…
Joshua Kristal, Photographer 