Print this story

Share this story

Email a friend

Your name

Your email address

Recipients’ email addresses (Up to ten, separated by commas.)

digg

del.icio.us

Over the past three years, Seth Kushner, 33, and Anthony LaSala, 32, both of Bay Ridge, have accomplished a whole lot.

They made hundreds of new friends, visited Steve Buscemi’s childhood home, took a ride with Rosie Perez and got past the guarded palace walls of Seagate. And, oh yeah, they wrote a book.

“The Brooklynites,” out Sept. 20, is a bound love letter to their borough.

“There’s something special about this place,” said Kushner, a freelance photographer. “You just never know what’s going to come out of someone’s mouth.”

The book features 206 photos, charting a course from Bensonhurst to Bedford-Stuyvesant, and capturing such borough notables as Jonathan Lethem, Spike Lee and Matisyahu.

“It’s is meant to be a snapshot of Brooklyn,” said LaSala, a senior editor at Photo District News and freelance writer. “What’s changing and what we love.”

This week, GO Brooklyn’s Chiara Cowan sat down with the authors and found out that while they love Brooklyn unconditionally, they definitely had favorites when it came to their subjects.

Olga Karmansky

Unlike some Brooklyn neighborhoods, Seagate boasts no bodegas or Starbucks cafes; it is literally a gate to the sea. And, it has secrets to which the rest of the world is not privy.

“I went to Mark Twain Junior High School down the street from Seagate,” said LaSala. “But I never went past [the gate]. I couldn’t get past the guard.”

Trading on the star power of 19-year-old gymnast Olga Karmansky, though, Kushner and LaSala were able to make it to the fabled land beyond the guard house.

“[Karmansky] was an amazing subject,” said Kushner. “She hopped up on the post and just held herself in these inhuman poses with the wind blowing. Our jaws were hanging open watching her.”

But watching Karmansky pose was still not as awesome as finally getting a peek inside of Seagate’s closed walls. “The gate closes behind you and you’re in another world,” said Kushner. “It’s incredible.”

Steve Buscemi

“We were just waiting on a corner in East New York where [Buscemi] grew up,” said Kushner. “I thought, ‘He’s not coming.’ ”

But Buscemi did show up and a quintessential tale of heart and history weaved itself together.

While Buscemi pointed out his former school and where he played with friends for the first eight years of his life, a man by the name of Michael Rosario poked his head out of an upstairs apartment window.

“There aren’t a lot of photo shoots on corners in East New York, so people look,” said Kushner.

Rosario happened to live in Buscemi’s old apartment and invited them in. “It was pure chance that everything fell into place the way it did,” said LaSala. “Such a beautiful moment and we got to share it with him.”

Billy T. Thomas

Some people told stories to Kushner and LaSala, but other people actually were the story.

Kushner and LaSala encountered Billy T. Thomas on a Bed-Stuy street after striking out with another possible subject.

What made Thomas unique is that he stopped them and asked for a photograph.

“He didn’t stop moving,” said LaSala. “He was amazing. He just had this energy to him.”

Thomas was full of poetic movement and lyrics; instead of posing, he strutted and instead of answering questions, he rhymed.

“Like they say, ‘All the world’s a stage,’” said Kushner. “We saw many shows.”

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper