2020 by Eric Klinenberg

Author:Eric Klinenberg [Klinenberg, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

“COVID Was Not My Primary Concern”

BRANDON ENGLISH

In September 2019, the Atlanta-based photographer Brandon English got a call from a friend in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. There would soon be an open bedroom in their apartment and they wanted to know if he was interested. The place was well located. It wasn’t too expensive, at least not for New York City. There was only one issue: it was directly upstairs from a funeral home.

English, who was thirty at the time, wasn’t bothered. In fact, it seemed appropriate. Fated, even. “I was coming off a time when several family and friends had passed away,” he told me. “Atlanta felt like a shell of its former self. Physically, personally, I needed to move on.” Living above a funeral home might not have been an ideal arrangement, but English believed that it could only make things more interesting. “I know it’s too grim for certain people. They wouldn’t want to live in a place like this. But it is work that is being done whether you see it or not.” And after all that he had been through, he said, “there was an aspect to it that was almost fated.”

The point of moving to New York was to live more intensely, take risks, do things he wouldn’t do anywhere else. For English, there’s a high bar for all that. He had been working as a photojournalist for the better part of a decade. Since 2016, when Americans elected Donald Trump, an outspoken nativist and unapologetic bigot, as president, English began seeing things differently—especially the images he produced on the job. He had been shooting political demonstrations by extreme-right-wing organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan. As a six-foot-five Black man, his presence at these events never failed to stir up everyone’s emotions. Journalism, he felt, didn’t have room for all the things he wanted to say and show about America. “I was disenchanted,” he explained. “It felt like it had reached its natural end.” It was time to let himself embrace a life as a visual artist, and New York would help him achieve that.

Initially, though, English just had to pay the rent. He found a job in the mail room and handling art at a gallery in Chelsea. Anything to be close to the creative world. “I had a bit of pensiveness about my own art. I was in a new place, and I didn’t really have a voice yet, or even the statements that I wanted to make,” he explained. “I spent the first months trying to understand the city.” He took long walks and late-night bike rides, tried plugging into local groups working on racial justice issues. One day, a friend messaged him about a demonstration against the New York Police Department, which had been accused of “brutalizing some kids” on the subway. “She just texted me: ‘Tomorrow. Union Square,’ with the time,” English said. “The next day, I was there.” The protest felt just like the ones against police violence in Atlanta.

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