WILLIAM CASTELLANA | SOUTH WILLIAMSBURG
William Castellana is an award-winning photographer based in Brooklyn, New York whose images have been published internationally in periodicals such as Silvershotz (The International Journal of Contemporary Photography), Rangefinder, Creative Quarterly (The Journal of Art & Design), Newsweek, Time, New York, and others. His work resides in the permanent collections of over 40 museums in the US including the Hood Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, New Britain Museum of American Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, and the Hunter Museum of American Art.
SOUTH WILLIAMSBURG
Street photography, in terms of the “unposed,” is a practice that serves the compelling need to distill the ebb and flow of visually complex interactions into static form – forever fixed and with meaning. It is this desire to understand more deeply the rhythms of humanity that takes me to the streets in search of clarity.
In their most straightforward sense, the images in this series form a social document of a people and a place, namely, a sect of Hasidic Jews known as the Satmars.
This sect of Hasidic Jews was founded in Satu Mare, Romania, by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum in the early 20th century. After WWII, Teitelbaum settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to lay the groundwork for a religious ideology that would launch one of the most massive Hasidic movements in the world. Since Teitelbaum’s death, the Satmar community has grown exponentially and continues to thrive economically and spiritually through strictly observed traditions and social mechanisms.
Between the fall of 2013 and 2014, I set out to photograph my neighbors in the one-half square mile area below Division Avenue, which demarcates the religious from the secular communities of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The photographs in this book are constrained to the “neighborhood view,” since my outsider status made access to a more privileged look impossible.
As an outsider, what I witnessed through my camera during that period was forever new and unique compared to my everyday routine and what the rest of the city’s inhabitants were pulsing. For me, street photography is about the preservation of time and place – a kind of poetry that distills both in equal measure.
