If you mention Jamel Shabazz to New Yorkers who are with it,their tone turns to one of admiration and respect. Shabazz has been one of the best visual curators of a New York City that so many who are Black and Brown recall vividly, a time when the city was pulsating with the sounds of a new music and culture we know as Hip-Hop. 

 

The Brooklyn-born artist’s photographs are nothing short of mesmerizing, and while there’s something in them for everyone, I find it moving that I’ve attained a true engaging connection to his work. It preserves and perseveres, and quietly challenges the castaway notions of what many have viewed the Black and Brown community to have been in those times. From the sharp cats with Cazal frames to the fly girls with their leather ensembles, his pictures are the extension of our regality.

 

That brings me to his latest publication for the masses, Prospect Park. I had the grand opportunity thanks to the publisher, Prestel Publlishers, to check this book out before its release last week. I found myself poring over every photograph, which covers a timeframe from 1980 to 2025. Shabazz’s superpower through his lens is to make theviewer feel as if they’re just a few feet away from the subject,in that space and in that time. There’s an array of moments captured here, from couples sharing quality time among the trees, to various people having summer picnics and the Drummer’s Grove, an institution in the park since 1968.

 

In flipping through this book, I thought about all the times I’ve spent in Prospect Park. I recall finding solace at the lake by the bandshell after my father passed. The different picnics I’ve had there with friends. Its the place where I had some of the best concert experiences of my life, from seeing and greeting the late Eddie Palmieri to celebrating Juneteenth at the Lena Horne Bandshell. Even those moments at night when the park closes, there’s a humming energy you still see at the treetops, enough so that those houseless will sleep under the outcropping branches on Ocean Avenue.

 

What also makes Prospect Park so special is that focus on the land fostering such lasting moments of community. That is heightened by essays contributed by The New Yorker Senior Digital Photo Editor Noelle Flores Theard, award-winning photographer Laylah Amatullah Barryn, and the honorable longtime community activist Richard E. Green. Each of theseessays, along with Shabazz’s own written reflections, give you a true sense of how much this space has meant to the people and how it has endured and thrived throughout periods of neglect by the city and been sustained by the love of neighborhood and community organizations.

 

Prospect Park is a celebration and a coronation through documentary photography, of both that park and Shabazz as a premier documentary photographer that has captured thecity as no other.