‘At this level in life I do not like titles – “avenue photographer”, “documentary photographer”, I’m bored with all that,’ laughs Jamel Shabazz. ‘I’d name myself a documentarian. I’m simply recording issues on my private journey. My digicam is my compass. It permits me to see issues on the earth that I wouldn’t see in any other case. I float, meet folks and study.’
Shabazz – a US Military veteran-turned-career jail officer, retired early to show unofficial social employee, mentor and, sure, photographer – is trying again over the photographs in his new e-book Prospect Park, a compendium of pictures he took in Brooklyn’s personal reply to Central Park from 1980 to 2025. A favorite of his reveals three girls, seen from behind, perched collectively on a low tree department: it seems that that they had been visiting that very same spot yearly since junior college to simply sit for the day and reminisce. Shortly after the shot was taken, a hurricane took the tree.
(Picture credit score: © Jamel Shabazz, 2025)
Prestel
Prospect Park: Pictures of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025
‘Everybody I’ve met within the park has had a narrative and with out my digicam – and the portfolio I’d carry with me, which helped present I used to be honest – I wouldn’t have had these conversations,’ says Shabazz. ‘However life is slower within the park. Persons are extra at peace, in order that they’re simpler to {photograph}. I’ve vivid pictures of going to the park as a baby, the place the air is clear, the place I noticed a lake for the primary time. It was an oasis, and after I was older, I realised I needed to get again there, and stored going again there, to jog, to meditate, at all times with my digicam. And it hasn’t modified in any respect. I can go there now and get the identical feeling.’
The park additionally supplied Shabazz with some reduction, not least from the truth that his day job was a litany of desperation and brutality in a ceaselessly hostile surroundings. It was a possibility simply to speak to folks and make connections, a course of in methods extra necessary than the pictures that got here out of it. ‘It was a possibility simply to see humanity in a distinct area, to share my story, hear theirs, possibly be an enormous brother to the youthful guys going through challenges of their lives,’ says Shabazz. ‘And everybody I met had a narrative [such that it] felt like there was a motive for that assembly.’
(Picture credit score: © Jamel Shabazz, 2025)
(Picture credit score: © Jamel Shabazz, 2025)
Nonetheless, his Prospect Park photos – households, {couples}, hobbyists, occasion folks, dreamers, wanderers, ‘a number of love and pleasure’ – are on the gentler finish of the photographer’s work. As a baby of the period of Life, Nationwide Geographic and Playboy – ‘magazines that created an entire visible language and a method of seeing the world’ at a time when images was arguably a extra vital medium – it was maybe inevitable that Shabazz’s work has extra usually targeted round harder-hitting social commentary: prostitution, race, homelessness, Aids, the crack epidemic. ‘Typically I really feel like I’ve solely seen these [bleak] sorts of pictures,’ he laments. Proper now, he’s volunteering in an animal shelter and dealing on a undertaking about animal welfare.
‘I’ve a profound love of canine, and the canine I used to be raised with was the best reward I ever had apart from a digicam. Truly, I’m getting somewhat bored with people proper now with all the pieces happening, with all of the hatred,’ says Shabazz. ‘However my father [an official US Army photographer] taught me at all times to have themes, so after I exit of the door I’ve at the least ten in my thoughts. My eyes are open, my digicam locked and loaded and I’m prepared to watch.’
(Picture credit score: © Jamel Shabazz, 2025)
(Picture credit score: © Jamel Shabazz, 2025)
Shabazz says that his many years of taking pictures Prospect Park pictures weren’t solely a reduction from the gloom; in the present day he loves social media, he says, ‘as a result of these unimaginable pictures feed my thoughts, however additionally they trigger a number of ache to see how unhealthy issues are too’. The park pictures had been additionally an try to offer a counter-narrative. Look, they appear to say, we’re extra alike than you think about. We are able to get on with grace and good humour. We are able to have empathy. ‘It’s not an escape [from the realities of life],’ Shabazz insists, ‘however a stability. Prospect Park has been a drugs for me too.’
Prospect Park Pictures of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025 By Jamel Shabazz with contributions by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Richard E. Inexperienced, and Noelle Théard © 2025 Prestel Verlag, Munich · London · New York
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(Picture credit score: © Jamel Shabazz, 2025)
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