Q&A with Lisa Cutler

  

 

 

Lisa Cutler is the creator of the photobook The Hook: A Photographic Journey Through Red Hook, Brooklyn. She is based in New York.

 

Q: What inspired you to create The Hook?

 

A: Creating a photo book was not my original goal. I was inspired to create The Hook after spending two years and creating 4,500 images in Red Hook during 2017-2019.

 

I had originally been taking pictures during the fall of 2017 in  Gowanus, Brooklyn. One early Sunday morning in October, I took a wrong turn and wandered under the towering Gowanus Expressway.

 

As I continued to walk, I knew instinctively that I wasn’t in Gowanus anymore. I was lost. I found the experience both scary and exhilarating. I decided to embrace the feeling of being lost and returned every Sunday morning.

 

My goal was to figure out where I was without using a map. Although there weren’t any people that early in the morning, I decided, If I saw someone, I would avoid asking questions.

 

I created hand-drawn maps in a little notebook that I carried while photographing. Unfortunately, a lot of places that I wanted to return to seemed to have disappeared.

 

It took three visits before I figured out where I was. While walking down Van Brandt Street, there was the Queen Mary. I now knew that I was in Red Hook but knew nothing about the area. I decided to continue wandering on without maps.

 

There were so many interesting clues to tell a story of this lost part of Brooklyn and its heritage. I was determined to figure out as much as I could by the clues I was discovering and by researching as I went along.

 

The idea of The Hook emerged from my journey of discovery. I wanted to share my experience and the rich history of a relatively unknown part of Brooklyn. There was the seed for The Hook.

 

Q: How did you choose the photographs to include in the book, and how did you decide on the order in which they would appear?

 

A: Choosing photos and sequencing them is a long and arduous process. The Red Hook project had won The Los Angeles Center of Photography’s Project 2020. The competition highlighted five photographers as winners for their “series work.”

 

That gave me the opportunity to choose and sequence my first 25 images of Red Hook. Those 25 images were the anchor for the rest of the 109 mages that appear in the book. Choosing 25 images out of 4,500 was a long and difficult task but there were clearly favorites.

 

I edited down to 500 to 300 and then to 200. After 200, it became very difficult to choose images. My floors became carpeted with photos. I started pairing images that I felt were strong together, printed them, and placed the images on a wall.

 

The Hook is more than just a photo book. It tells the story of a journey that I took while lost in an area of Brooklyn. The pictures give you clues to an unknown area without revealing the location. Because there are no people in the book, the photos are interesting hints to a neighborhood rich in history.

 

Q: What do you think the photographs say about the neighborhood of Red Hook?

 

A: My photographs of Red Hook tell a story of failed industry, forgotten places, and a part of the city that had been separated from its communal core and ruined by misguided urban planning.

 

Against the half-built and half-ruined urban landscape, there are budding scenes of youthful life, new commercial enterprises, converted warehouses, and new buildings popping up behind graffitied fences.

 

My pictures in The Hook show Red Hook in flux. It took me the full two years of photographing to understand Red Hook’s complete history.

 

Once a successful immigrant sailor-driven community of the late 1800s and early 1900s, Red Hook degenerated to a desolate crime-ridden community. Now we see Red Hook emerging as a young hip community filled with entrepreneurs, artists, restauranteurs, and community-minded people trying to hold on to Red Hook’s history.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I hope that people take away from The Hook the journey that I experienced while being lost. Ignoring all modern technology or printed maps, I was able to let go of my fears and to press on to explore an area that, while I was there, was absent of people.

 

Through photographing different buildings and scenarios I hope that people can feel the same curiosity that I felt while shooting: Why were the ballfields overgrown, why were the factories in ruin, and why were entire neighborhoods disappearing?

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have several different series that I’ve been working on. One is a series that I developed during Covid called Memory which shows a world without people.

 

Here, before shooting each image, I try to think back and wish I had a picture or reference of what the space might have looked like. I know that life existed here, but it felt that it just picked up and disappeared.

 

These photographs show the fragility of the world we live in. They force us to conjure up scenarios of playgrounds full of children and restaurant parking lots full of cars and people.

 

Without people as a reference, these images stand as monuments to another time. As with Easter Island, all that was left was monuments as clues to a civilization that had once existed.

 

Road Trip is a series taken while driving through the Grand Canyon and areas near Sedona. While trekking through abandoned theme parks, horseback riding through the desert and photographing details of the desert, I captured timeless black-and-white images.

 

The idea of Hidden Homes came as a surprise to me. While walking in a familiar neighborhood, I noticed “The Pink House.” I took the picture, went home to develop it and thought, what is this? You can barely see the subject.

 

I kept analyzing the image and realized that the beauty was not necessarily of the home, but how the home creates a frame, or backdrop for the blooming trees. I then, started noticing other “Hidden Homes” that also became interesting because of how they reveal themselves in the image.

 

Creating this series of photographs was an adventure that started out on the east end of Long Island. This journey has taken me to Florida, California, Minnesota, Portugal, Peru, Nevada, and other states and countries.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb