The James Beard Award-winning photographer and Black Food Folks co-founder guides us through the borough he’s called home for four decades.
T
here is no shortage of people willing to tell you about Brooklyn. The borough has been so thoroughly branded that the myth now precedes the place. What’s harder to find is someone who truly knows it: who grew up here, got priced out of one neighborhood and learned to love another, who has spent the better part of two decades documenting what’s been lost and what’s stubbornly, beautifully survived. Clay Williams is that person.
A James Beard Award-winning photographer and long-time Roads & Kingdoms collaborator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Food & Wine, and Bloomberg, Clay grew up in Bed-Stuy when it was, as he puts it, “not the place folks went—in the era of Do the Right Thing.” He spent nearly 30 years there before rising rents pushed him out around 2014, and has spent the dozen years since in Sunset Park, one of the few corners of Brooklyn that has so far resisted the full force of gentrification.
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