New Photography Exhibition Depicts Students’ First Encounters With Green-Wood Cemetery
Brooklyn Historical Society has just opened a new photography exhibition that lets the viewer see Green-Wood Cemetery through the eyes of students experiencing the oldest landscaped space in New York City for the first time.
“Wonder: First Encounters with Green-Wood,” which features the work of City Tech students and opened September 30, will run through January 15 at the Brooklyn Historical Society, which is located at 128 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights. The public is welcome to visit the historical society from 12pm to 5pm on Wednesdays through Sundays. For more information about visiting, go here.
“None of my students had been to Green-Wood before, and they all found the cemetery astounding,” Professor Robin Michals, who teaches digital photography in the Advertising Design & Graphics Arts Department at City Tech, said in a press release. “The photographs in this exhibit are my students’ responses to three different first encounters: with Green-Wood Cemetery itself, with the experience of archival research, and with the basics of photographic style.”
To prepare for the trip to Green-Wood (which just had a video about it narrated by John Turturro), the students visited Brooklyn Historical Society’s Othmer Library to examine original documents related to the cemetery’s history: engravings, maps, a rule book, and hand-written documents about burials.
“The photographs in ‘Wonder: First Encounters with Green-Wood,’ by 23 City Tech students, beautifully reference the many social and cultural roles that the cemetery has played and continues to play in the lives of New Yorkers,” City Tech said in its statement to the media.
For more information about the exhibit, visit the Brooklyn Historical Society website.