CBH Talk | Photographer Jamel Shabazz on Prospect Park: A Brooklyn Oasis

Renowned photographer Jamel Shabazz returns to the borough that has shaped his life and art with his most recent book, Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025. This expansive, meditative volume captures the heart and soul of Brooklyn through one of its most beloved communal spaces. Join Shabazz as he shares a wide selection of images and reflects on their stories in a conversation led by photographer, curator, and writer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn.

Long before he became celebrated for his street photography, Shabazz served in the U.S. military and later as a corrections officer for twenty years. Prospect Park offered refuge from the pressures of those environments—a place to find balance, community, and inner peace. His book’s introduction, “My Oasis in Brooklyn,” speaks to the grounding role the park has played in his life. Since 1980, he has returned again and again with his camera, documenting the park’s vibrant pulse.

The collection features his signature portraiture of Brooklynites—Afro-Caribbean percussionists at Drummers Grove, dog walkers and chess players, elders gathered on benches, and families savoring quiet moments together. Paired with these intimate encounters are lyrical landscape views that reveal the park’s lesser-seen calm and natural beauty.

Together, these photographs illuminate Prospect Park as both a bustling cultural crossroads and a tranquil sanctuary. In revealing a profoundly personal dimension of Shabazz’s practice, the book offers a compelling testament to resilience, fellowship, and the power of shared public space in the life of a city.

---

Participants

Jamel Shabazz is best known for his iconic photographs of New York City during the 1980s and 1990s. A documentary, fashion, and street photographer, he has authored twelve monographs and contributed to over three dozen other photography-related books, first gaining widespread acclaim with Back in the Days and A Time Before Crack, renowned for their vivid portrayal of 1980s style and culture.

His photographs have been exhibited worldwide and his work is housed within the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Brooklyn Museum, The Fashion Institute of Technology, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty Museum, The Dean Collection, the National Gallery of Art, the Center for Brooklyn History, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. He is the 2023 recipient of the Lucie Foundation Award for his achievement in documentary photography, and the 2022 awardee of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl book prize.  As an artist, Shabazz’s primary objective is to contribute to the preservation of world history and culture.  

 

Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a photographer, curator, and writer whose work explores Black diasporic communities, cultures, and memory across the African diaspora. Born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with familial roots in South Carolina, she has worked as a photographer for more than 25 years.

Barrayn is the author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora and We Are Present: 2020 in Portraits, with a third book on Black photographers forthcoming. Her photography and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, BBC, and The Guardian, as well as in books including Reflections in Black: A Reframing, Photography: A Feminist History, and Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, among other titles. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Brighton Photo Biennial (UK), the Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial, MoMA PS1, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, among others.

She teaches photography at Rutgers University–Newark and at the International Center of Photography, and is a graduate of New York University. She is also co-organizing a 2026 convening in Accra, Ghana focused on Black photography archives.