A Day Out in Brooklyn

The best part of long-distance collaboration is finally being in the same place.

Alison and I started our photography collaboration back around 2015 with our Dreamspace project, a photographic correspondence between our two cities. We start writing each other letters before that, so we have a lot of excuses to stay in touch regularly throughout the year. And yet we only see each other in person once a year or so, when I pop down to New York City on my annual east coast jaunt. Long distance collaboration is great. Being creative in the same space is even better.

I’m always too busy in NYC. It’s a city full of friends from all parts of my life, from ex-Bostonians to ex-Istanbullus. I talk and laugh myself hoarse, I drink too much coffee and booze, I zigzag between neighborhoods. I love it, I’m exhausted by it. In that mad mash, I make space to spend time only with Alison, and we together try to do something creative together.

This year, we decided to do a double exposure Brooklyn stroll. The idea was that we would each shoot a roll of film on our walkabout during the first half of the day, and at an appointed time, we’d swap, and finish the doubles during the second half of the day.

It almost worked.

We thought we’d planned around one of the major anticipated problems. I was shooting with a Pentax K1000 and Alison was shooting on an Olympus, and we’d learned over the years of our collaboration that the images would layer upside down if we combined those two cameras. (The film loads from opposite sides of the cameras, which is what causes this.) So Alison shot with her camera upside down. She had a roll already loaded in her camera, but it was only a few frames in, so she decided to use it for our walkabout.

Unfortunately, the film she was shooting with was from our Dreamspace project— she wasn’t shooting the first layer in Brooklyn, she was shooting the double.

We realized after the first half of the day. So the images are still upside down and are doubled between Brooklyn and Istanbul, rather than our shared day in Brooklyn.

But no matter! Film is unpredictable, that’s part of the joy. All the color images are doubled from our day in Brooklyn, strolling through an African street festival and lingering in parks and soaking in the summer of the city. The black-and-white images, meanwhile, are pure Dreamspace— and extra surreal, because images I shot are often layered with images of me, hanging out in NYC. And finally, we have some images of us layered together.

I can’t wait until the next time we meet, and we can continue to have photographic adventures that lead to unknown ends. The messiness, the mess ups, the pieces we can’t control— those are the things that make it all so much fun.