Patrick O’Hare "Evanescent Cities"


Evanescent Cities is a photographic exploration of Long Island, Queens and the Greenpoint and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn. The book registers the imprints, textures and spaces of an older, grittier sensibility and architecture of working class neighborhoods, juxtaposed with a smoother, seamless, technology centered world of glass and steel, fast becoming ubiquitous. Both worlds exude little mysteries of light and volume as well as their particular states of transience. A state of mind that is both illusionary and tethered is evoked as one feels frozen in an uneasy dream between epochs. The series of photographs allude to both the socio-economic and the existential through depictions of the everyday. Single story homes, parking lots, community gardens, back yards and other intimations of the private, alternate with worn infrastructure, the controlled chaos of construction sites, the uniformity of luxury condos, and other markers of time. Rather than a traditional documentary approach, Evanescent Cities presents a more subjective, fragmentary vision. Like a prose poem, it aspires to an awareness of transition itself, a reorganizing of the shape of space as it alters our sense of perception. The title, Evanescent Cities, refers to the idea and paradox inherent in development; of the loss that often accompanies it.


One sees a world, a skyline rising and somehow as it rises, simultaneously vanishing, ceaselessly whirling in a cycle of reality absolving itself.


Photographs taken 2018-2019 in Long Island City, Queens, New York and Northern Brooklyn