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…
Category: Religion
My lecture at the MSU Arts and Humanities Dept.
I recently was honored to participate in the Wednesday Night Live lecture series at the Residential College of the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. I spoke on two topics: Living as a Creative and the Power of the Still Image. In preparing for the talk I stumbled upon the roots of my becoming a photographer. …
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…
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…
Film images from J’ouvert festival with the HOLGA
The J’ouvert festival recently unloaded itself unto our weary Brooklyn and it now stands firmly, surely, as my favorite annual cultural event. Starting at 3am, its hypnotic, rhythmic procession of steel drums and motor oil covered revelers snake their way down Flatbush to Empire then head East. I realized, while standing in the middle of the street drinking…
J’ouvert mon ami.
I had reservations this year. Almost none of the neighbors I hang with go on account that its too dangerous, waking at 3 am is strange and I went last year. J’ouvert, the before dusk until you can’t stand, West Indian folklore crash course, sexified wine-fest (try this dance when nobody is watching), Nut-cracker, weed & rum…
Book of my Peru images.
I just made this epic tome of my images from Peru. I built it as a book dummy and portfolio piece. Its about 160 pages and is being printed on high quality, Ilford Pearl Lustre paper with archival end pages, an oatmeal colored linen cover with this cool, wrap around cover sheet. You can view…
Tin-foiled covered kitchens of the Crown Heights Jews.
During the Passover holiday’s of the Jewish religion observant Jews go thru the laborious but important task of cleaning out all and any trace of “Chametz” (or leavened bread) from their home. And they get VERY intense about it as its one of the greatest religious transgressions if one ingests any bread during the holiday…
Stonehenge and its Neo-Druids at Winter Solstice.
Neo-Druids, the contemporary followers of the ancient order of Druids, gather four times a year at Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain of South-Central England. During the Winter and Summer Solstice and Equinox, the 3000 year old site is opened fully to spiritual revelry. All other days of the year one has to walk a path around the stones…
Ash Wednesday in New York, Catholics showed their extreme devotion.
Every year I am taken aback by the flocks of devoted Catholics walking the streets, eating lunch, riding the subway and smoking cigarettes with giant charcoal crosses on their foreheads. It usually makes me feel like I am surrounded by nutty zealots but after further consideration I figure its just shock as it’s quite rare in the US for Christians…
ENGLAND!!!, in all its strange and wondrous glory.
The “English breakfast”. I went to Stonehenge on the Winter Solstice in search of Neo-Druids and I was not let down. As there is no public transportation there I opted for a 3 mile hike in the dark on a confusing public footpath which went thru farms and fields. Thousands of pantheist, pagan, neo-druids and hippies…
Crown Heights Labor Day/Carnival Parade
Yes, there were at least 3 shootings and innocent folks were killed and yes, its weird when detectives tape off an area and mark bullet casings on the sidewalk as marijuana and jerk chicken scents intermingle and people carry on as if nobody was just shot 10 minutes before in that very spot. But, people…
Joshua Kristal, Photographer 