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In 1994 John Bartelstone ventured into a mysterious walled city on the waterfront of Brooklyn, New York and emerged in 2009 with the photographs for this book. This is his personal take on the Brooklyn Navy Yard of that period. It is a structured impression of a dreamscape. Do not buy it if you are looking for a history book with images of your father’s battleship being built. This collection of large and medium-format black and white photographs captures a place that was arrested in time since the end of the Second World War. The book attempts to present this time warp before it vanished and it does not focus on contemporary activities in the Yard. It focuses on what makes the Yard such a special place.
New York City’s largest and oldest industrial facility, the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard occupies 250-acres on the East River between the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges, and is presently one of New York City’s major industrial sites. One of the last remnants of Brooklyn’s industrial supremacy, theYard has experienced tremendous change: functioning from the age of wind to that of diesel. As a cradle of naval evolution, the Yard has had to reinvent itself constantly, and this is made evident by the presence of buildings and structures spanning from the 1830s to the 1950s.The Brooklyn Navy Yard, the first monograph by John Bartelstone, offers a quiet and striking look at the Yard as a time capsule of industrial New York. The Yard today is a fusion of the sublime and the practical, with eerie abandoned elements existing side by side with vibrant businesses. Bartelstone’s camera is partial to the former. The images show a place out of time, where World War II New York is still palpable. Now, thirty years after the first photographs of this series, the pace of loss at the Yard has quickened and the book has become a reference for those who wish to see what was retained by the end of the 20th Century and lost in the second decade of the 21st.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard Exhibition, March 18—April 25, 2010
Click here to view the exhibition prints
John Bartelstone is a New York based architectural photographer. He originally trained as a recording engineer at Syracuse University. After working in the recording industry for a few years, he enrolled in the Master of Architecture program at Columbia University and upon graduation, began a ten-year architecture career. That time was spent in the Engineering Department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where a love for infrastructure was further kindled. Then, in 1996 he started a new career as a freelance architectural photographer.
