JPG Magazine: Stories: Photo Essay: Brooklyn Nights

Brooklyn Nights

By Eamonn Aiken

27 March 2008

The first night I spent in the Terminal Market Warehouse yard photographing the progress of its demolition I stood in awe of a modern ruin. The building's commanding presence, even in its crumbling form, was remarkable. Among the most recognizable and historically significant buildings in Brooklyn (Civil War ironclad USS Monitor launched from these yards), the structure was destroyed in a 10-alarm fire that called greater attention to the issue of land use in Brooklyn's continuously escalating real estate market. Though being considered for landmark status protection when it was destroyed (under suspicion of being an intentional "developer's fire"), the site was a reminder that history won't protect modern ruins the way it does ancient ones - the land is too commercially lucrative to be left to cultural importance, and it was therefore important to me to begin making as complete a record of the place as I could before it was (as it is now) completely leveled.

This was something of a new direction in the project I'd been working on in North Brooklyn. I'd been photographing sites that appeared completely uninhabitable, and yet were immediate or almost immediate neighbors to dense residential housing. Waste transfer stations, refineries, sites of chemical contamination, an underground oil spill - all within a few blocks of my home, sometimes just down the corner. Though the burning of the complex released unknown quantities of toxins into the neighboring residential blocks and threatened more widespread severe fire damage had nearby fuel tanks lit, this was the first time the images had begun to also focus on the impact of redevelopment on historic and culturally significant locations. I began shooting the sites at night using long exposures on a large format camera as a storytelling mechanism - these were sites I passed by everyday, that were typically paid no second mind. By leaving the shutter open for sometimes several hours, lighting the scenes with moonlight, street lamps, factory lights, and passing cars, the landscape took on a surreal quality that echoed my own emotional reaction (and disbelief) regarding the health of the land we live on.