(video by Sean Alday & Dallas Athent)

We met photographer Meryl Meisler at The Living Gallery. The J train rumbled overhead and people were partying out on the block. Inside, she was chatting with her crew about photography and the hood. She immediately greeted us to tell us her story.

Meisler got her first intro to Bushwick in the 1980s as an art teacher at a local school, a job which sparked her project, Defying Devastation: Bushwick Then and Now. “I just walked out of the subway onto this place I was going to teach. I can’t say I was in awe. I was in shock of what I saw because it looked like a wasteland. It looked like the aftermath of a war.”

She continued, “The previous spring I was teaching in a school on the Lower East Side, and somebody came in and said ‘I have a gun. Give me your camera,’ and I gave him my camera. So I wasn’t afraid of working in Bushwick, I was working in East New York before that. But I was fearful of carrying a camera and getting robbed again. But walking back and forth to the subway I was attracted to people just living their life. Even though it looked like a rubble wasteland, I knew I was obsessed. I wanted to take pictures, so I bought my first point and shoot camera and just carried it.”