“Too much development, too little thought. Ugly, uninteresting, uninviting projects that primarily serve investors abound...” These are common complaints about Brooklyn’s changing landscape, articulated better by many before me.

Instead of just critiquing the quality of development in Brooklyn, I'm interested in exploring the idea that some undeveloped places could be left alone. I have no idea how practical this is, or truly, how well it would serve the public at large. But selfishly, aesthetically, impractically, I find myself mourning lost empty lots and buckling piers and eroded warehouses. They are beautiful to me, and serve a similar purpose as rural wilderness...an escape, an antidote, a contrast to the imposed structure of progress and development. A rare source of solitude.

I'm intrigued by some recent attempts to invite the public while retaining a sense of the wild: the partial polishing of DUMBO, and the opening of the high line in Manhattan. But even these seem overdone. Both feel more like theme parks than like their old selves.

My photographs aren't prescriptive. I don't present them as answers to questions of urban planning. I do hope that they'll reveal some hidden beauty and intrigue in the kinds of places where I've lived and wandered--the kinds of places that seem harder to find at all as years goes by.

- Paul Raphaelson