Photographer Jonathan Atkin, the ShipShooter | Episode 163

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Renowned nautical photographer Jonathan Atkin takes us on a high-flying tour of New York’s working waterfront, which he often photographs from the air to capture container ships, cruise liners, military vessels, and any other type of working craft. For every shoot, Atkin must coordinate logistics among at least 40 people in a high value, high security setting while hoping the weather cooperates. His experience as a merchant seaman and his knowledge of the harbor and its operations are critical to his success. Come along for a ride like no other as Atkin shares a bit of his knowledge and some of his work.

Please note that all images in this presentation are the copyright of Jonathan Atkin and cannot be duplicated or used in any manner without the express written consent of the copyright holder. The photo above was photographed for Cunard, ©2018 Jonathan Atkin.

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How to Take a Walk in an Era of Social Distancing with Photographer Sean Carroll | Episode 144

PAST PROGRAM | Virtual Programs

In the height of the pandemic, artist Sean Carroll drew inspiration from his street and neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to create How to Take a Walk in an Era of Social Distancing: A Step-by-Step Guide, a multimedia project aimed at documenting his and his family’s daily activities as a way to approach daily life in this new reality with, “clarity, empathy, and humor.” As a professional photographer and former tour guide, Sean will share stories and insights from this ongoing project and will use the guide as a leaping off point to highlight how Pittsburgh’s geography, topography, and history have affected the development of the region, and ultimately what led him, his wife, and children to live in Pittsburgh and specifically on the block where they live. Sean Carroll is an artist using photography and video raised in coastal Massachusetts, now living in Pittsburgh. He received an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he lived for many years, and teaches within the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

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Up Close and Personal with Food Photographer Clay Williams | Episode 51

PAST PROGRAM | Virtual Programs

Get a snapshot of the life of a food photographer. Brooklynite Clay Williams will join us to discuss his experience working on cookbooks, at the James Beard Foundation, on projects for the New York Times, and being the official food photographer of the Vendy Awards. In addition to sharing his stories and mouth-watering photos, he’ll give us some tips on how to get great food photos from our phones for Instagram or just your own personal memories.

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ARA General Belgrano: A Lost Ship, A Stolen Photograph

Color photo of a cruiser sinking with ocean in foreground and orange lifeboats on the water.

At 3:57 p.m. on May 2, 1982, the British submarine HMS Conqueror fired a spread of three torpedoes at the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano, located approximately 230 nautical miles southwest of the Falkland Islands. Two of the weapons found their marks, fore and aft of the ship’s protective belt armor on the port side. In less than 30 minutes, the order was given to abandon ship, and Belgrano sank, taking 323 souls with her.

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Vote in the 2017 Brooklyn Navy Yard Photo Contest

A collage of industrial features of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, including a crane, salt pile, tugboat in a dry dock, and ropes and rusty machinery

Over the course of five years of leading our photography tours of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we have received well over 500 photographs from 118 photographers submitted to our photo contest. For year five, we need your help to select the best photo of the Yard of 2017. All of these photos were taken across four two-hour explorations we led in partnership with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92. This year, we received 121 submissions from 18 different visitors, and our judges volunteered their time to select the 10 you see below.>> Continue reading

Brooklyn Navy Yard Fall Photo Contest

For our penultimate Brooklyn Navy Yard Seasonal Photography Tour of 2017, we asked another Yard-based artist to make selections for the year-end finalists. Nick Golebiewski is a visual artist who makes large-scale gouache paintings – a type of opaque watercolor – of New York cityscapes. His “Nick’s Lunchbox Service” is daily drawing series in which he draws the landscape in front on him, and is definitely worth checking out on his Instagram feed. The series is in its fourth year and has been featured as a Twitter Moment, in collaborations online with the Jewish Museum, the Museum at Eldridge Street, and Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, and through the “Walk & Draw” tours he’s led with the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.>> Continue reading

Brooklyn Navy Yard Summer Photography Contest Judge: Painter Jeff Britton

On our Brooklyn Navy Yard Photography Tours, we’re always encouraging people to look for the unexpected. Even on streets we’ve walked down a thousand times, there may be something new, or something very old you never noticed before.

Walking down the halls of the enormous Building 3, constructed in 1917 and one of the Yard’s largest buildings, I recently found something very unexpected. I walked into Triple J Bedding, a distributor of linens to hotels and hospitals across the country; stacks of sheets, blankets, and towels were stacked floor to ceiling with just narrow passages between them. After wending my way through this cavern, I found a little oasis at the back – the studio of artist Jeff Britton.>> Continue reading

Immigrants Who Made the Brooklyn Navy Yard Great: Baldev Duggal

This post is part of our eight-part series profiling immigrants to the United States who made significant contributions to the Brooklyn Navy Yard from the eighteenth century to the present day.


Baldev Duggal (1937–2016)

So far in this series, all of the individuals we have profiled worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when it was still a naval shipyard. But Baldev Duggal was an individual who played an instrumental role in the long process of transforming the Yard from a dilapidated naval facility into a thriving industrial business center.>> Continue reading

Vote in the 2016 Brooklyn Navy Yard Photo Contest

This is year four of our photography tours of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and we need your help to select the best photo of the Yard of 2016. All of these photos were taken across four two-hour explorations we led in partnership with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center at BLDG 92. We received 118 submissions from 22 different visitors for our photography contest, and four judges – one a former staffer at the Yard, one a BLDG 92 Visiting artist, and two artists with studios in the Yard – volunteered their time to select the 12 you see below.>> Continue reading