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…
Tag: Brooklyn
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…
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…
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…
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…
Gentrification in Bushwick for New York Magazine blog, Bedford & Bowery
I did a story on the gentrification going on in Bushwick, Brooklyn for Bedford and Bowery, a new New York Magazine blog a couple of weeks ago. Hipsters are moving in and integrating their culture with what has been for the last years a predominately Latin neighborhood. The juxtapositions are incredibly visual and ubiquitous. Barber shops and…
Blood and Guts at the Black Flag show in Brooklyn.
I started working with the newly launched New York Magazine blog Bedford and Bowery, a localized blog covering the Lower East Side, the East Village, Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint in Brooklyn. The show was epic. One of the hardest concerts I have ever photographed as there was a pretty raucous mosh pit, my leg was in a…
Hipsters, Hanger-ons, everyday folk and the like.
Images of concert goers from last summer at Prospect Park and Central Park.
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…
O Sky Garden of Crown Heights…the toil was worth it.
After 3 years of mediocre results gardening in the north-facing, tree-shaded, mosquito breeding ground, old dog-fighting training area junkyard, huge 60×60 ft. (by NYC standards) area we call our backyard, I grudgingly moved plants and soil alike upstairs to the 5th story roof of my apartment building in Crown Heights. Not without its trials and tribulations (melodramatic dust-ups…
Joshua Kristal, Photographer 