Thanks, PDN, for featuring Memory City on your Photo of the Day, January 28, 2016—Alex and Rebecca
“When we put together books, we often think of structural analogies to music. A big book is a kind of symphony; a small book a sonata. And the ultimate rhythm of [Memory City], how we interwove color and black and white, portraits and street photographs, reflected the music that we discovered in Rochester: a contrapuntal kind of rhythm, reflecting the odd contrasts and juxtapositions of the city.”—AW, from the PDN Q&A
“I’ve always considered poetry and photography sister arts, since both share many of the same concerns: memory, passing time, indelible images, metaphor. So poetry was one of my windows into understanding Rochester, a city that a richly diverse number of poets have called home, including John Ashbery, Marie Howe, Cornelius Eady and Ilya Kaminsky. Taken together, their poetry allowed me to see this multilayered, multicultural city from a variety of different angles and viewpoints. In particular, the insightful and brilliant Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky—deaf since a misdiagnosed mumps at four, who’d moved to Rochester as a teenager after his family was granted political asylum, and, sadly whose father died a year later—has a line that first began to shed light for me on this struggling yet soulful city: “Time, my twin, take me by the hand through the streets of your city.”—RNW from PDN Q&A
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