Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: A Pinhole Photography Project
Join me on YouTube for an hour of time-traveling with Walt Whitman! (“Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”). Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, poet Howard Nelson, and I read Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” screened 80 of my pinhole photos of New York City ferries, and discussed Whitman’s sweeping meditation on time, our interconnectedness, and the transcendent power of art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I10gDazWQx4
Produced by the Walt Whitman Initiative.
In 2009 I was photographing the NYC harbor for a commercial story about sunken Guggenheim treasure in the waters off Staten Island. Without realizing it I was, from the Staten Island Ferry, being pulled into the imagery that Whitman said future readers of his poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” would experience. Digging deeper into my ferry-riding I read the poem and poet Howard Nelson’s essay on it. Nelson’s observations — about the poem’s kinesthetic quality and about how, in his daily ferry-riding, Whitman was moving among archetypes — reminded me of my blurry, dream-like photos and sparked an idea: to make an interdisciplinary book on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that included the poem, my photos, and several essays.
