Captivated by New York City’s Lower East Side »

Q. Sakamati is a Japanese photographer who has won a reputation as an acclaimed documentarian of conflict and suffering. His latest work returns to his own early days in New York City. Upon arriving in the city in 1986, he moved to the East Village, where he was alternately charmed and horrified by what he saw. Dilapidated and abandoned buildings lined the streets. Entire blocks were filled with little more than rubble and bricks. Heroin was sold in candy stores, and gunshots sounded in the night. Even more surprising was the huge number of people who were living on the sidewalks. Before long he was drawn to Tompkins Square Park, the East Village's central gathering spot, where he found a lively mix of people. There were law students, punks, poets and older, lifelong residents who could remember the days of the New Deal. Twenty years ago this week the neighborhood was also much like a war zone as protesters clashed with police officers seeking to enforce a curfew in the park. “This [work] focuses on Tompkins Square Park as the symbol and stronghold of the anti-gentrification movement, the scene of one of the most important political and avant-garde movements in New York history,” Mr. Sakamaki explains. As his black-and-white photographs make clear, Mr. Sakamaki found much that was life-affirming amid the conflict and poverty. The energy and camaraderie of people who banded together in the face of suffering and adversity appealed to him; so did the desire of East Villagers to create their own social order even as they received little help from mainstream society. But the work focuses mostly upon the lives of the homeless people who lived in the park or on the nearby streets. The streets and park paths shown in his documentary still exist, of course, but many of the people who populated that landscape have died or left town. In the end Mr. Sakamaki’s photographs of New York's East Village and Tompkins Square Park is a valediction to lost people and a lost place that has been supplanted by a neighborhood that he finds rather sterile and uninspiring. "We lost our culture," he said, "and we lost control of our dreams." A number of stunning photographs and a wonderful video-slideshow of Mr. Sakamaki's pictorial documentary (with music by Nick Drake) are included.

Read Full Story at disembedded.wordpress.com »

282 Views Share Story 0 Comments Report