“I moved here when Ops opened up,” Corey Jermaine tells me. I had been aware of his work as a photographer for some time now, ever since he pitched me on a vertical that would capture the street style outside his doorstop, somewhere between Variety Coffee and L-Train Vintage. The people he found in between these spots of commercial Bushwick were an interesting group, between 19 and 27, apparel designers, artists, college students; they represented a certain vision of the neighborhood in the popular imagination, people on the precipice of going somewhere else. Less than a decade ago, Jermaine was like them too, a young Penn State graduate with a marketing degree, living in New Jersey. He made the hop to Bushwick in 2017, splitting an apartment with a sing-songwriter friend. She eventually left, but Jermaine stayed. In the years since, he’s turned in profiles of local indie singers and podcasters, who all lend his lens a kind of streetwise affect, animated by a kind of self-awareness in their eyes.
These days, he’s bringing his portraits of street style to his first gallery show in Bushwick, at Westlab + Gallery, a small film development outfit on Irving Avenue is going to be hosting some of Jermaine’s photos, until mid-November. The show is going to be called “It gets better with time.” He says the Westlab show is a sort of living document of what the years that followed looked like near the Jefferson street L station. “It’s an area where things are changing,” says Jermaine. “I have a couple friends who can’t live in the neighborhood anymore, but I think that’s happening throughout the United States. It’s really hard to be an artist here.”
Nevertheless, Jermaine persists.
To pay the rent, he picks up freelance branding gigs here and there, but prefers not to talk about them. “Nothing I’m dying to share,” he says, saying he keeps that life “separate.” He says his move to the camera was inspired by the popularity of Scott Schuman, the street fashion blogger with a million followers for his work as “The Sartorialist,” an Instagram account that birthed a series of coffee table books. Where Schuman prowled lower Manhattan for the latest new outfits, Jermaine finds his muse in the blocks surrounding the Variety Coffee On Wyckoff. In kind, Jermaine is on his own, second self-published collection of these photos (“STUDIO SESSIONS VOL. 2”) which he plans to release with the show, and which he puts out through Conveyor Studio, a local print shop.
“When you say Bushwick, people know where this is. They’ve heard stories about it. More people than ever know about the area,” he tells me. When he finds people in the street, they always seem to be doing something, living in some kind of vividly articulable kind of way. “People here feel like they are just living, they’re just doing it so effortlessly. It’s a neighborhood where you can put things together on a whim,” he says.
“It gets better with time” is going to be on display at Westlab on 131 Irving Avenue, starting Sept. 15 and running through November 17th.
All photos from Corey Jermaine’s “It gets better with time.”
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