Elena Lyakir

In recent years my Brooklyn neighborhood has dramatically transformed due to gentrification and real estate overdevelopment. The gradual disappearance of punctuated natural environments has been uncanny. I began taking photographs of still remnant vegetated sites as a form of record. Now and again I would return to several locations I had photographed to observe the transformations. As I witnessed the ominous green construction fences morphing landscapes and consuming places where, not long ago, thriving flora served as habitat for birds and other city “wildlife”, I was compelled to explore this subject viscerally.
In this ongoing project I compose in-camera double exposures of intimate pockets of nature photographed in and around inner cities to create immersive large-scale panoramas. The abstract visual quality of the double exposure technique echoes nature in constant flux – a result of the human influence on the environment and the fast approach of Anthropocene.
The project had expanded to include other cities in the U.S. and around the globe. City Parks Romance illuminates random sights of vegetation and city parks as an expansive and dreamy atmosphere of romance and nostalgia – sentiments we often feel for nature as a result of living in urban environments.