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Day Break in Brooklyn

Michael Webster

03 Sep 2024 • 6 min read

Yesterday was J’Ouvert and it got me feeling nostalgic so I revisited the photos I took in 2013 and processed a few that I had never processed before. So here ya go, never before seen photos from my J’Ouvert project.

I don’t know why I didn’t like this photo way back when. These guys are part of an overtly political group that made fun of people in the public eye at the time. I saw them every year and have lots of pics. Most of the public figures and their controversies are largely forgotten these days. This guy was Anthony Weiner.

J’Ouvert is a spin off of the French Carnival tradition that began as a way for enslaved Caribbeans to ridicule their oppressors. Rather than the prim and proper ball with fine clothes and high manners, the J’ouvert revelers covered themselves in mud, paint, or oil and enacted Dionysian celebrations in the street. There was a lot of political commentary as well.

This photo isn’t about anything tangible. It’s an attempt to capture chaos. The feeling of something about spiral out of control.

This photo was an attempt to honor the history of J’Ouvert.

I went to J’Ouvert most years over a ten year stretch. I think it was where I felt most at home during my time in New York. I’m sure I was attracted by the insanity and danger and subversive politics and sexuality and partying and the general feeling that things could spin out of control at any moment, which they always did at least somewhere along the route. A few people die violently there most years. There is definitely an element of danger.

This was an argument that came to a punch and a knock down.

This is a different version of this scene from the one I originally published. This one is not quite as disturbing.

As with most of the important things in my life, I knew nothing about J’Ouvert until I randomly stumbled onto it. I used to routinely get up at or before dawn and explore different parts of south Brooklyn. One morning I was over near Nostrand Avenue and ran into a crowd of very drunken painted people, many of whom were wearing horns, and several of whom were simulating sex in the street. I reverse engineered their route up to Nostrand and saw the remains of the celebration and a few of the last stragglers stumbling here and there, the street filled with trash and various Caribbean flags blowing around. I learned the name of the celebration was J’Ouvert and made a note to go earlier next year. And so I did.

My J’Ouvert always started a few hours before dawn with a walk over to Empire Boulevard where the parade starts. I’d see some strange scenes on that walk.

I have a lot of weird photos from these walks. Where do the shadows come from? That’s what I can never fugure out.

For me to fit in and be able to physically handle the challenges that J’Ouvert presents, it was necessary to adjust my chemical composition in various ways. Back then I had prescriptions for pain killers and amphetamines, so I’d always start the morning with a little pharmaceutical speedball. Once I got to the parade, there were people selling alcohol so I’d get on the same wavelength as the revelers by having a couple Heinekin and then some jello shots. People would paint me or smear oil on my face along the way, so by the time I got to the end of the route, I fit right in. Karmically anyway. Visually I stood out like a big pink sore thumb.

I like how the hand mimics the flag. And how she looks like she’s feeling the cosmic waves.

The parade kicks off at day break, but there’s a lot going on in the dark beforehand. It was only the last two years I went that I started at the museum the night before and was there at midnight with a big chunk of the revelers. That’s a long night of drinking and music. But the energy constantly builds until the dawn when it explodes and moves on down Empire Boulevard.

The notable thing about 2013 from a photographic perspective was that I used flash and even tried some gels. I thought it worked real well in this pic. Too bad I didn’t get to go back the next year and keep working that idea.

Note how different these people near the beginning of the parade look vs. the ones at the end up on Nostrand.

Girl on one of the steel drum floats. I was never able to get any great pics from the big drum floats. A few are okay, but I learned to forget about photography and enjoy the sights and music when things started cranking up for the break of day.

I took a lot of pics in the dark when I couldn’t see much more than the outline of the subjects or they were bathed in the red and yellow glow of the Brooklyn street. It’s too bad I didn’t go again after 2013, I would have exclusively used flash.

Then there’s the middle route where the sun is coming up and it’s getting light and the floats and marchers spread out a bit.

The black motorcycle clubs in Brooklyn are interesting. I’d run into them at other places. Thought crossed my mind to see if they’d be into a photo project, but never got that close to them..

This is a view of one of the floats and the crowd probably about halfway up Empire Blvd. to Nostrand. Not a great picture, but if you look closely, it’s representative.

I have hundreds of pics like this. It’s impossible to keep people from posing. I’ve come to appreciate them more over the years. Not the pose itself, but the thought that went into it.

Eventually, it takes a right turn at Nostrand. Most of the big floats peel off there and the real craziness goes to a different level. People are really wasted by that point. So am I.

Then it’s over and people start coming back to reality. If you’ve ever came out of something real weird and back into the mundane, bourgeois existence, you have some sense of how I felt riding a few stops on the subway. Decompression, they call it. Best not to do it to fast lest there might be negative repercussions.

All that was in 2013 so I guess I’ve been more or less decompressed for 11 years and a day now. It’s starting to feel a bit tiresome. This year, for example, for Labor Day I did my little pharmaceutical speedball, which ain’t what it used to be, drank a bottle of wine and took my wife to see Hamilton. I needed the faux speed to to stay awake though a two and a half hour show and the pain pill to keep me just on the right side of pure agony squished in my torturous little chair in the cheap seats. Lola was dressed very proper for a woman of a certain age. No paint, no oil, no face covered with talcum powder. And although the play was superficially something like J’Ouvert - it’s about a Caribbean guy with a heavy dose of politics with music and singers and dancers - but it’s nowhere near the same.