a little funny to be reminiscing about this place now.
probably had a million opportunities to go before, and all of a sudden – looking through old pics – i suddenly thought back to that night there in 2015.
see, when i was a kid, i didn’t live in a “cool” place… the few years i lived in brooklyn before we fucked off to the suburbs.
i was too young to remember much, but what my sister tells me is that we used to hear a lot of sirens… living next to brookdale hospital as we did. so brooklyn may have always been cool, to an extent, but…
but we didn’t live near brooklyn museum, or in one of the neighborhoods where you’d hear caribbean music all day on weekends, or near any of the parks. no “prospect” for me, no “herbert von king”.
so fast forward to today. or should i say, about six years ago from… today. whatever.
as with my earlier set from the makossa: freedom party in 2015, i wasn’t even living in brooklyn at the time. i had moved into the first place that i really loved in my adult life, a large one-bedroom in astoria with a breakfast nook and closets large enough to leave a body in, were you so inclined.
but as with all of my eight years in queens – and probably earlier – whatever social life i had was always centered about brooklyn.
and that’s the convoluted story of how i end up at a bilal show in herbert von king park in the summer of 2015, the pictures being a habit i had started to pick up then.
looking back, i think about two things: 1) if this wasn’t a knock-on effect of afropunk’s influence on staging things in brooklyn. and maybe even those “celebrate brooklyn!” thingies they’ve thrown in prospect park since forever. and 2) this is when i really started experimenting with taking pictures and editing color and contrast and lighting. taking them with that older (even for 2015) sony nex-5t and developing them in lightroom. this was when i started to get the whole process down.
in any case, i really like how these came out. i do feel like i’m back there on that day, a little bit, just enjoying the music and feeling the sun on myself and simply getting out of the house.
and maybe wondering what pictures i would get from there now that i live about a ten-minute walk away. maybe.