(1) Ilana Ross
(1) Independent Photographer - Brooklyn, NY. Ilanaross00@gmail.com - Social Media: @_ihavethisthingsforchairs_
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I moved to Brooklyn in August 2023. I felt a deeper connection to Brooklyn and could no longer bear to watch people wait in line for another Tik-Tok promoted, white-washed restaurant. Upon my first weeks in Brooklyn, I was excited to see the cash-only bars, record shops, and 30-year-old bakeries surrounding me. As I kept circling the same few blocks, I came to discover a peculiar thing about Bushwick: while no street was the same in residents or storefronts, each street had a common thread.
I spotted chairs left and right, it became an amusing game; they were sprinkled across Humboldt st, locked to bike racks and gates, in front of school yards, abandoned buildings, and barbershops. I sensed there was strong attachment over the beaten up, plastic chairs. It wasn’t until 6 months later I began to sense an attachment myself. They inhabit streets in Bushwick for their owners to return to the physical world and civilization.
On my walks home, I studied the interaction between object and owners more carefully. Community members congregated at the outskirts of intersection, enjoying each other’s company on sidewalks. The chairs wait for them to socialize, watch strangers pass, or sit in silence hours with neighbors. There are no cellphones or technology in this engagement, a routine filled with nostalgia, returning owners to their homeland.
Chairs have come to represent more than just a connection; they are a testimony to residents’ existence. Dragged to the middle of the sidewalk, sometimes the road, as a claim of ownership of the 4 - 5 ft parameter it encompasses. With the rise of new entrants and the fall of their neighborhood, residents are losing their homes.
Throughout art and design movements chairs have maintained their utilitarian objectives. Unlike other design objects, only human beings can utilize chairs. They are a point of human reconnection, and protest, resistance, to the money flowing into Brooklyn from investors to ‘redesign’ neighborhoods.
Manhattan developers have started to penetrate further into Brooklyn, closing family businesses, remodeling old apartments to make space for my generation; more and more interested in getting in on the Brooklyn trend. Naturally, there is money to be made in development and investors are not shy to take the opportunity.
This new “investment” neglects to maintain space physical or cultural space for inhabitants that have resided in the area for decades. Congregations and culture have been flattened for higher paying tenants, and only one object remains to document their presence: chairs.
After spending months studying the neighborhood, these chairs have become my neighbors; they have provided a sense of honesty and security. I greet them on the way to coffee but never their owners. With the continuous construction and remodeling across streets, it is not my place to interrupt their peace with my selfish curiosity during the final few months or weeks in peace.
The chairs, and human connection will be lost due to the prioritization of financial returns and prioritization of financial returns from my generation. When scaffolding went up on Humboldt, one of my friends went missing. A wave of emptiness passed through my chest and stomach, an anxiety as if I misplaced a prized possession, and uncertainty if would ever see it again.
Comment 1
Chairs, an object that has marked our lives. Since early childhood, we have been in close contact with this object for many hours of our day. In preschool, the chair represented a place for play; in elementary school, it was where we learned the basics of writing, math, and history. In high school, we spent countless hours on a chair studying, and even today, a large part of our work is done sitting on a chair. In short, it is an object that accompanies every phase of our lives, both solitary and social: at the table, we eat sitting on a chair.
These images immediately bring back memories of when I was a child, when, in the countryside, outside every house, my grandmother would stop to chat with the villagers sitting on a chair outside their doorstep. And these photos instantly awakened in me that feeling of nostalgia for an era when conviviality was valued, when there was room for long moments of waiting, for downtime. A feeling of emptiness and awareness, but also of hope: we are a more individualistic society, we sit on a chair to mostly communicate with ourselves, but we fight for a free future, for equality, for the respect of nature and our planet. These old chairs in our lives are disappearing from the streets, with the hope that in their place there will be room for something even greater.
In all these photos, the chair is overshadowed by the bright background, and it is for this reason that the object, which at first glance conveys to the viewer a sense of abandonment and decay, soon gives way to a more positive feeling. The white of the house, the green of the lawn, the overexposure of the snowy road, as well as the streetlight casting the chair in shadow in the last photo, all speak to a strong human desire to remain connected to the past, overwhelmed by a light that symbolizes the potential for an innovative and revolutionary future.
Even the first black-and-white image, where the tied chair and the stool are well-lit, seems to tell a story of a connection to the past that must soon make way for the future: the classic chair is tied, while the stool, representing a more modern and innovative design, is not.
In short, these images, with their dual transmission of emotions, allow the viewer to reflect on the past in order to protect this authentic place in the future.
Comment 2