East Harlem

Traditional notions of New York City's neighborhoods as both spatially-bounded and culturally-distinct are increasingly threatened by gentrification. When I made my home in East Harlem in 2017, I expected to both participate in and bear witness to the inevitable gentrification of this place. Living and photographing here yielded photographs that are not so much about that, nor are they a “salvage ethnography” of a neighborhood under siege. Rather, these photographs document East Harlem in the present. There is a stillness here, as the neighborhood and its people exist daily within the broader national context of inequality and political uncertainty. Through this series, I represent the feeling of being home here - documenting the physical representations of culture and color that make-up this neighborhood today. In doing so, I also reflect on tensions in contemporary photography between the visual logics of identity, social justice, and representation, and aesthetics, process, and form.