Cities Erased

It was 2011, I just moved to NY. I was new to the city and I decided to photograph the stores in the street of my neighborhood. I was living in East Brooklyn and I was mesmerized by the immigrants that created these commercial places that were an extension of home, overloaded with objects, history and multiple specific roles. 

Today, 12 years after, most of these stores are gone and replaced by standardized hipster cafes, barber shops, smoke shops and curated groceries stores. Our cities are becoming homogenized and spaces are becoming standardized. It’s like an updated version of the concept of NO SPACE that Naomi Klein introduced in 1999, “a west of youth-oriented, cool-hungry consumer capitalism, in which companies sold an idealized lifestyle, not the physical product on the shelf”.

This is an on-going project. I plan to shoot the neighborhood today and portray the gentrified changes as an example of a global transformation our cities are going through.