While in Ethiopia a few years ago I was invited to photograph at the facilities of a prominent coffee exporter. Addis Exporter sources and exports green coffee beans around the world (that day by chance, two of the best coffee purveyors in the US were there cupping the offerings; Intelligentsia and Counter Culture Coffee). The space was…
Category: Sub-Culture
Sunday afternoon Baseball in a Nicaraguan cloudforest.
I recently spent a month in Nicaragua working, volunteering and travelling the country. A highlight was the time I spent with a small agricultural community living within a Nature Reserve in the North Central mountainous region. MiraFlor lies in a cloud forest, a tropical forest with lots of moss, wet vegetation and yes, low-level clouds….
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.
Video on the Ethiopian coffee ceremony
In Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, the daily drinking of this ancient beverage is part of a ritualized cultural ceremony rich in history and sometimes hours in length. The beans are freshly roasted, incense is burned and multiple cups are passed around. The 30 minute video I recently completed for an Ethiopian nonprofit has this 2 minute video about the ceremony with-in it….
Show at the Society for Domestic Museology
I am currently showing two series of work (its still up for anyone who wants to check it out) at a cool little gallery on the Upper West Side in NYC. A series from a baby beauty pageant as well as a series documenting sites where people have been lynched are on display….
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…
The NYC Pride Parade and WOC lesbian after-party.
I got a great assignment this year shooting the Pride Parade for the venerable NYC non-profit Housing Works. You can see all of those images here. These are some of my favorite images from the parade.
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…
Joshua Kristal, Photographer 