Brooklyn: The City Within

Any book with the word Brooklyn in its title is special for those of us who are fortunate enough to live here. This one has particular relevance to readers of the Park Slope Reader however not only because the couple who made it are our immediate neighbors, but because The City Within that they refer to in their title is “the green heart of the borough: Prospect Park, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Green-Wood Cemetery”.

This is, almost literally, two books in one. Rebecca Norris Webb’s photographs and words that focus on our green spaces are even printed on slightly smaller-sized pages bound like a sandwich in the center of the volume, whereas Alex Webb’s rather bigger share of the book takes him on forays across our entire borough.

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He returns repeatedly not simply to Brooklyn’s complex diversities, but to the beguiling contradictions that are reconciled here on a daily basis, or in the case of his remarkable photographs, in the blink of an eye or a camera shutter. In fact he goes out of his way to accentuate what he calls the “quotidian, yet sometimes enigmatic, world around me” in the images here. In the visual cacophony of an image captioned Williamsburg, 2014 for example, the space is chopped up by construction barriers, a lamp post, and the entrance to Bedford Avenue subway station, while it is simultaneously dragged back together by the fragments of graffiti and stickers that cover everything that has stayed still long enough to be covered in them. And then, in a weird sort of pictorial alchemy, a shirtless eighties-era muscle man pasted to the wall seems momentarily the twin of a young guy striding determinedly out of the right of the picture frame while he lifts his Nike t-shirt and scratches his toned belly.

So this is more than a book that confirms how remarkable our borough is, it is a book that makes us realize that Brooklyn is even more than we imagined.”

A few of Rebecca Norris Webb’s images are a little simpler. There is for example her gorgeous Mute Swan, though even here a strange rectangular pink glow falls on the swan’s back and makes the image somewhat enigmatic. More often she treats us to wonderful visual complexities through her use of deep spaces filled with details at different scales, some in and some out of focus. And she is a virtuoso of the bewitching reflection in photographs like Shimmering in which the illuminated ceiling of the LeFrak Center skating rink is somehow seen as though floating in a spectacular evening sky. Even if this was the only image in the book it would be well worth the cover price.

Fortunately there are more than eighty other images here, a number of which – like Shimmering ­– I cannot work out how they were created, and one or two of which – like Alex Webb’s view of Gowanus, 2016 ­– juggle fleeting reflections in an equally entertaining way. Having enjoyed this photograph will make my F train ride into Manhattan forever a little different.

Reflections are also present in Rebecca Norris Webb’s poems and short sections of prose: reflections of the work of other writers, of their lives and experiences, and – more obviously – of the world that is Brooklyn that she knows as well as most of us do. Sometimes the pages of text that appears in books filled with photographs are little more than negligible footnotes. That is far from the case here, and Norris Webb’s use of language is exquisite. When she describes looking down into the darkness from an airplane and “Prospect Park passes beneath like a great dark ship,” or asks “Can the rain multiply anything that’s blue?” then it is obvious that hers is a genuinely cross-disciplinary art in which, to quote Alex Webb’s brief preface, “words and pictures create places where landscape and memory, history and reverie meet.”

The recurrent delight that this book offers is the chance to see things differently. Differently to how we had seen them before, and even differently to how we imagined they were. In its pages we find a building-wide mural weirdly echoed in the Scotch tape wrapped around a telephone pole; a woman dressed as a somewhat fanciful version of a lobster while another strips down to her bathing costume; a raccoon high in the branches of a tree, its eyes glowing ghostly in the darkness; and two serious little girls dressed for the Ragamuffin Parade while behind them on the sidewalk a couple of bekilted gentlemen play the bagpipes. 

So this is more than a book that confirms how remarkable our borough is, it is a book that makes us realize that Brooklyn is even more than we imagined. Or perhaps for each of us our personal City Within is the mixture of what we know and what we imagine. So, to give the final words to Rebecca Norris Webb, “I wonder how many of us now – this moment in Brooklyn – find ourselves inhabiting two worlds at once?”

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Get your copy of Brooklyn: The City Within by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, published by Aperture – HERE