I didn’t photograph the Feast to “document culture.” I lived there and loved it.
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel has been a Williamsburg summer fact since 1874. The Sunday lifts—the days Williamsburg tightens up around Havemeyer Street and turns muscle into ceremony—begin in 1903. Those dates matter, but what matters more is what they produce: Williamsburg at its best—working-class life in plain view, in its simplest form. People from the neighborhood lifting something that weighs tons with nothing more than hands, timing, a band, and a singer. The meaning isn’t hidden. It’s solidarity you can hear: as one, we can do anything.
And it really is tons. An 85-foot aluminum-and–papier-mâché tower—the giglio, named for the Italian word for lily—comes in at about four tons, and it isn’t alone: a several-ton boat moves with it. They get “danced” (that’s the church word) up and down Havemeyer and North Eighth with 200-plus men under them. A cadre of veteran capos runs the whole thing—commands barked in Italian—while the brass bands planted on the structures blast out marches like they’re trying to wake the dead and the landlords at the same time.
This book focuses on the two Sundays and the opening procession because that’s where the Feast shows its whole hand. The opening procession moves through the streets and ends with Our Lady placed in the shrine for the duration. Then come the lifts: the band, the crew, the crowd pressed in close, the timing, the strain, the sudden joy. You can call it faith if you want. You can call it theater. You can call it work. It’s all three, and it’s also the simplest thing in the world: people pulling together, literally.
The photographs are arranged year by year, 1985 through 2004. Each year includes the opening procession and the two lift Sundays. That repetition is intentional. Ritual doesn’t need novelty; it needs continuity. When something changes, it’s the neighborhood changing—not the photographer trying to keep you entertained.
You’ll also see neighborhood pictures inside the Feast—street corners, stoops, faces. A lot of them are the people from my block, the people I saw every day. Some are elders who are long gone now, from a Williamsburg that’s long gone with them.
This project stops in 2004 for one reason, and I want it said cleanly: I was forced out of my home on Union Avenue—against my will, and against the law—and I never went back to the Feast after that. Not once. And to be clear, that had nothing to do with the Feast. The Feast is life-giving. It wasn’t the problem.
I took the only place that would take me, a co-op on Fordham Road in the Bronx, and rebuilt from nothing. Got old by this time, had to work always for years to get back on my feet let alone return to a neighborhood i was pushed out of.
The Feast didn’t fade. My access to my old neighborhood did. The Feast was, and is, the best. Truly as good as a secon Chritmas in the summer.
The Pictures are artifacts of lived experience., working the Feast. So when I shoot, that’s enough.