In January of 2011, I moved to Manhattan to pursue a master’s degree in social work, but once I arrived, the city remade me. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and spent my undergraduate years as a student athlete in Storm Lake, Iowa. Photography, once a hobby, quickly became my lifeline. It became a way of bearing witness, of staying alive in the unrelenting flow of the city. My camera, a Leica, became an extension of my body. I turned to the streets, and the city itself became my collaborator and my confessor.

After two semesters of school I moved out of student housing to Bushwick, Brooklyn. Once I settled there and found my community, the social worker in me asked, What is my responsibility to this place and to these people? It took years to find the answers, but keeping that question alive allowed me to be educated by my surroundings, by the landscape, by the people.

I came to know Bushwick through its joys and hardships. I befriend- ed a kid on my block named Cedric and saw him grow and become an adult. I watched as a community garden on a busy corner was fenced off, demolished, and replaced with a condominium. My camera was always at my side—once mistaken for a gun, but it has also been a key that opened doors to conversations and connections.

Over time, my photographs became a mirror. They revealed not only the place and its people, but my own transformation, and the cost of it. Photography was a rhythm, a language to express my experience of be- ing in a Black body, in a Black community, and of navigating the world beyond it.

In recent years, the rhythm faltered. Pandemic, divorce, dislocation. The camera slipped from my neck into my bag. I thought I could live

without it, go the other way, into pure consciousness with no frame to hold it. But I learned that photography was never just about making pictures. It was survival, embodiment, a way of staying present in a world that is often unbearable. Without it, my footing grew unstable.

So the Leica returns, not as nostalgia but as necessity. These pho- tographs are offerings from that edge, testimonies of the beautiful catastrophe of being alive, of being human, of being here. In his essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity,” James Baldwin wrote: “The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.” The only response is to bear witness anyway, to risk everything on the truth or poetry of the image.

Andre D. Wagner

2014 - 2024