2004 was a hell of a year. Serious gentrification had begun one year earlier on my block in Brooklyn, as well as, being the starting point for deep care for my family, that they needed during their slides towards death.
I began a long process of juggling shoots with family care and trying to survive displacement from gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Already, for one year, my home had been turned upside down. Just the noise of redevelopment, new construction, the recent purchase of my building by the son-in-law and it’s renovation, combined with the 24/7 noise of one of the biggest scum dog hipster bars that ever existed in Brooklyn, being right next-door, would be enough to destroy anyone’s psyche and neurological health. Of course, 24/7 family care isn’t conducive to rest or sleep either, so there was no respite. This process would unfold and proceed to get worse for the next eight years, culminating in my final displacement, against my will and the laws of NYC rental law, that only ended in my illegal displacement in 2013.
At this point shooting was not a joy, if it ever was, but something to get through, due to exhaustion, no funds and no sleep. My goal was to go to southern Ohio and shoot the AK steel plant in Middletown. I chose motels halfway between Middletown and Cincinnati, so that I could get into the city and do some shooting in the Over-the Rhine neighborhood, itself, on the verge of its gentrification. The first night I got there I ventured into downtown Cincinnati and the old neighborhood in a nice rain on a December night. I found it so reminiscent of my home in Brooklyn and also so much a part of what I’ve been shooting my whole life, I decided to divide my time between the steel plant in the north and Cincinnati in the south and Ohio River. That night I scoped a street scene of rain and shops on Vine Street. It was the New York Cleaners, along with another shop called New York, and I shot it for two hours in that rain, creating quite a bit attention from the street crowd, who, apparently, never saw such behavior before.
Many would warn me about the dangers, and others would just ask what I was doing, but it was clear it wasn’t part of the streets culture, in what they, from the hood, believed to be the most bad-ass neighborhood in their city. Whatever, I don’t even think about it, and all these different cities, and other things I do. I just do it. It’s been my life.
But in retrospect what I was doing was trying to go back home or, at least, get a picture of something that reminded me of my home.
If it wasn’t for fighting illegal displacement and family care, I would have, in 2000, began two books on the Bronx and Cincinnati’s over the Rhine neighborhood. Four years later I had a little bit of time to grab some shots and some sounds in Cincinnati, but I would never find the time to return, and the place became quite gentrified and I missed out on documenting that time on the edge of losing so much old history. I plugged away at the Bronx work whenever I could maybe twice a year, until I was illegally displaced and ended up there in 2013, in which case, I began, in earnest, the Bronx book.