The Invisible Dog Art Center, in partnership with the Brooklyn Book Festival are thrilled to present the launch of New York Waterfront Diary by Sophie Fenwick in collaboration with Albertine bookstore.
Join photographer Sophie Fenwick, along with Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, writer Eddie Joyce, oral historian Nicki Pombier & poet Silvina López Medin for a conversation about a unique and evocative portrait of New York City’s changing waterfront, New York Waterfront Diary, by the French-American photographer Sophie Fenwick, has been published by 5 Continents Editions.
The book features nearly two hundred images drawn from an archive of photographs—gelatin silver prints, color slides, stills taken from Super 8 films, and digital snapshots—Fenwick has been creating since the early 1990s.
More than mere documentation of an essential part of the life of the city, New York Waterfront Diary is a meditation on time and distance. Echoing the richly observed detail
in the stories of the writer and waterfront wanderer Joseph Mitchell and the grittily poetic settings of Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, Fenwick’s project summons both memory and imagination.
A longtime New Yorker, Fenwick was born in Manhattan, spent part of her childhood in France, and moved back to New York at the age of nine. After she began living in Brooklyn when she was in her early twenties, and while she was working at Magnum Photos, she was inspired to begin documenting the waterfront, often capturing scenes of abandonment and decay. New York Waterfront Diary includes images taken in all five boroughs of New York City as well as the Port of New York and New Jersey. Additional photographs feature views of ports in Dunkirk, Le Havre, Antwerp, and Bremerhaven, locations that became part of Fenwick’s waterfront journey through work she did with the Seamen’s Church Institute during the 1990s.
“They provided a sort of haphazard navigation through time,” Fenwick says of these photographs in an illuminating conversation with the photography curator, historian,
and writer Pauline Vermare that is included in New York Waterfront Diary. Among the sights the images capture are pre–Civil War warehouses in Red Hook, the historic sailing ship Wavertree at the South Street Seaport, dry docks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, decaying structures at Bush Terminal in Brooklyn, the now-vanished Coney Island Jumbo Jet and Thunderbolt roller coasters, and changing views of New York Harbor.
Some of the photographs appear alongside poetry she calls “nocturnal daydreams,” which Fenwick wrote during the darkest days of the Covid19-pandemic, in spring 2020, when her father died and she was unable to join her family in France. Dream meets reality in words and images that evoke challenges the city has faced over time and the solace offered by its proximity to water.
Lev Zeitlin of Red Square Design developed New York Waterfront Diary’s striking scrapbook-like layout concept, as well as the “Waterfront Diary” title. Zeitlin also created the book’s design.
Sophie Fenwick studied photography at Parsons in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York. She has worked as a film curator and has exhibited her photographs at numerous spaces including in Paris at Victoire Schlumberger and in New York at Philippe Briet Gallery, Thread Waxing Space, the Museum of the City of New York, the Seamen’s Church Institute, and the Brooklyn Public Library. New York Waterfront Diary is her first book.
Instagram: @sophfenwick
Sean Corcoran is the Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. His exhibitions have included Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs, Voice of the Village: Fred McDarrah Photographs, and Brooklyn: The City Within: Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. He has written extensively on photography, including essays for Elliott Erwitt: At Home and Around the World, and I See a City: Todd Webb’s New York and several other publications. He is currently co-curator of the Museum’s inaugural contemporary photography Triennial, New York Now: Home.
Eddie Joyce is a writer. His first novel SMALL MERCIES (Viking 2015) was shortlisted for the Grand Prix De Litterature Americaine in France and was a NY Times Big City Book Club pick. He has written pieces for N+1, Electric Literature, and Akashic Books. A graduate of Harvard University and Georgetown Law Center, he was a white collar criminal defense lawyer for ten years before starting his writing career. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three daughters. He was born and raised on Staten Island.
Nicki Pombier is an oral historian, writer, and educator. She is Founding Editor of Underwater New York, a platform publishing creative work inspired by the waterways of New York City since 2010, and from 2018-2021 she was an organizing member of Works on Water, a nonprofit organization dedicated to artworks, performances, conversations, workshops and site-specific experiences that explore diverse artistic investigation of water in the urban environment. Nicki worked as a literary editor for SILENT BEACHES, UNTOLD STORIES: NEW YORK CITY’S FORGOTTEN WATERFRONTS (Damiani, 2016, by Elizabeth Albert with Underwater New York.) She is a part time faculty member at The New School University's College of Performing Arts and adjunct faculty member at Columbia University, where she teaches in the Oral History Master of Arts program
Website: nickipombier.com
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York. She has published five books of poetry including La noche de los bueyes (Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize), 62 brazadas (City of Buenos Aires Poetry Prize), and That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (tr. Jasmine V. Bailey, Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her hybrid poetry book Poem That Never Ends was a winner of the Essay Press-University of Washington Bothell Book Contest. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and Robert Hass’s Home Movies into Spanish. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Harriet Books/Poetry Foundation, and MoMA/post, among others. She has taught poetry workshops at the International Writing Program/University of Iowa, the University of East Anglia (UK), and NYU. She is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.
Website: silvinalopezmedin.com
This event is a part of the Brooklyn Book Festival
Admission
Free with RSVP
Location
51 Bergen St.