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Photography Exhibit Traces Freshkills Transformation with Lomography Camera

By Nicholas Rizzi | August 12, 2015 6:42pm
 Photographer Stephen Mallon spent more than a year documenting Freshkill Park's transformation.
Freshkills Park Lomography Exhibit
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STATEN ISLAND — A new exhibit will trace more than a year in the life of Freshkills as it transforms from a landfill to a park.

Photographer Stephen Mallon will display a collection of ten of his photos, part of his series on Freshkills Park titled American Reclamation Vol. 4, at the Lomography Gallery Store in the West Village starting on Thursday.

"I've been attracted to repurposing of land for quite some time," said Mallon. "With Fresh Kills being one of the largest landfills in the U.S., it was definitely a point of interest."

He already knew he wanted to include the park in his series of shooting reclamation sites — including recycling plants and MTA cars being dumped into the sea to create an artificial reef — and when he was invited on a group tour of the site he knew he wanted to keep coming back.

"The landscape was just stunning to experience, so I told them about my project about how I’d like to make this like an ongoing essay and come back and forth for a while," he said.

Mariel Villeré, manager for programs, arts and grants at the park, said she thought Mallon's work would be a perfect fit for the site when she first invited him to a tour, and took him around the grounds for the project.

"I thought that this would be an interest to his portfolio and an aspect that would work to our unique identity," she said. "He just was immediately engaged and energetic and motivated to come out whenever he had the chance."

She frequently invites photographers and artists into the site as a way to show the under-construction park — which is opening in phases and expects to be fully ready in 2026 — to the public, she said.

"It’s not open to the public," she said. "As we build the park project I've been working with a number of different artists who are representing the site and basically give the lens and representing it to the public without all the logistical purposes of bringing them in."

For the project, Mallon visited the park every few months and spent time taking photos with three different cameras. Mallon, who said he primarily uses digital cameras for his work, was approached by Lomography to use their latest fully manual film camera for the exhibit.

"I have not shot analog in like 15 years," he said. "It got me to relax a little bit about it. It was kind of good to get off a tripod and get back to a little bit of 'Let's shoot this and go.'"

The exhibit will feature photos he shot with the camera during his visits to Freshkills, and Mallon said he mainly focused capturing old remnants of equipment used by the Sanitation Department when it was a landfill.

While he's been shooting at the park for a while now, Mallon said there's still sections he hasn't been able to get into yet and expects to continue to visit for another six months or year.

"We’re finding there’s more and more things to capture every single time," he said.

"This was probably the longest term project that I followed. The fact that I’m going back to this location over and over again, it keeps on expanding, every single trip I get, the light is different and I found something else."