Where a photographer’s curiosity became a two-year commitment

Though he grew up only a few miles away, Jonah Markowitz, a Brooklyn-based photographer and documentary filmmaker, knew little about the Kensington neighborhood prior to 2021. of applications for new business licenses came from the area that included Kensington.

So he started exploring the neighborhood, which had been a center of Bengali life in the city since the 1970s. Mr. Markowitz expected to start a project on economic trends in an immigrant community.

Instead, he spent nearly two and a half years visiting the same corner in Kensington, working on a portrait of the quiet transformation of a New York City neighborhood.

Mr Markowitz’s contribution, published this week by the Metro desk, gave an intimate glimpse into one of the city’s largest Bangladeshi communities. With photos, videos and text, Mr. Markowitz introduces readers to a street corner where newcomers seek employment in construction and food delivery, and the Muslim faithful take up nearly an entire city block during Eid al-Fitr services.

“Sometimes we get numb to reorganizing neighborhoods, of societies around us,” Mr Markowitz said. “This project is somehow an antidote to that.”

After a few trips to Kensington, Mr. Markowitz presented the idea to Jeffrey Furticella, a photo editor at the Metro desk. Mr. Furticella said he had a soft spot for stories about New York’s evolution.

“One of my main desires that I discuss with photographers at the beginning is to create a time capsule of a moment,” said Mr. furticella. “New York is always changing, for better or for worse. Communities evolve, businesses come and go. Nothing lasts forever, and I think one of the great responsibilities of the Metro desk is to provide a historical account of a city that arouses worldwide curiosity.”

Mr Markowitz said his reporting was slow at first. He was hampered by language and cultural barriers.

“There’s a hesitation to let outsiders in and, conversely, there’s a hesitation for outsiders to spend a lot of time there, frankly,” he said. “It took quite a bit of time to be there every day and show up before they trusted that I was invested in the story.”

Mr. Markowitz visited Kensington approximately 75 times during the project. He went to restaurants, private homes and local businesses. He went on delivery drives, attended religious services and observed dance performances, all to better understand the lives, values, worldviews and experiences of those living in Kensington.

“By spending so much time, we were able to explore all these layers,” said Mr Furticella, “these important themes of labor, the immigrant experience and political influence, of changing norms in a cultural environment where it is strongly men are dominated, but women are increasingly creating space for themselves.”

Karen Zraick, a reporter at the Metro desk, and Samira Asma-Sadeque, a New York freelance writer, provided additional reporting from the neighborhood. Ms. Asma-Sadeque, a Bangladeshi American, enjoyed exploring the daily routines of the area. “It’s just about an existing community, about everyday, ordinary life,” she said. “That’s the beauty of it for me.”

After several months of reporting, Mr. Markowitz and Mr. Furticella came up with a clear vision of how to represent street scenes in a new way. mr. Markowitz used a Phantom high-speed camera, which can capture film at 1000 frames per second. Just five seconds of footage captured by the Phantom, when slowed down to 1,000 frames per second, results in nearly four minutes of video. It weighs more than 20 pounds and is typically used in highly controlled environments or studio settings to record test footage from car crashes.

“It’s one of those grail-level tools,” Mr. Furticella said. “It is a highly unusual use of this camera to use it for editorial stories. And it was this fantastic experiment.”

It was every photojournalist’s dream to use the Phantom at high speed on the city streets, said Mr. Markowitz, because it allowed him to capture unguarded moments with depth and detail. In the digital presentation of the article, a man washing his face and a praying believer are cinematic backgrounds for the text that scrolls across the screen.

Now that the project is complete, Mr. Markowitz plans to make frequent trips to Kensington for the food — goat biryani and fuchka are “must-have” dishes there, he said — and the friendships he’s forged. Many of the families he met even invited him to Bangladesh.