Peeling the Apple

This body of work examines the peripheral landscapes of New York City by focusing on East New York, a neighborhood at the eastern edge of Brooklyn, where suburban conditions exist within the city proper, challenging dominant imaginaries of New York City.

Peeling the Apple

This project examines the peripheral landscapes of New York City, reconsidering the dominant image of the city as “the world’s most culturally influential and economically centralized metropolis.” Yet behind this spectacle, the city’s structure is continuously reshaped by redevelopment and the influx of real estate capital, while subtle but undeniable transformations unfold in its peripheries.

I was born and raised in Japan and moved to New York in 2020. As an outsider, my initial perception of the city was likewise shaped by a vertical and celebratory urban image. However, this territory has already been extensively represented by numerous photographers and artists. In order to transform my position as a foreigner into a critical standpoint, I chose to distance myself from the symbolic center of the city and turn my attention toward its margins.

Since 2024, I have been photographing East New York, located at the eastern edge of Brooklyn. Although administratively part of New York City, the area retains distinctly suburban spatial characteristics, including low-rise housing, vacant lots, and wide roadways. In recent years, it has become the focus of redevelopment plans and housing policies, with new residential complexes and infrastructural projects underway. Yet despite these ongoing transformations, it has remained largely overlooked—existing, in many ways, as a blind spot within the dominant narrative and visual imagination of the city. At the same time, long-established residents and communities are being compelled to adapt to these transformations.

Through an observational approach, the project records small-scale renovations, shifts in vacant land, buildings under construction, and the people who inhabit these spaces. Rather than emphasizing dramatic moments or iconic imagery, the work seeks to visualize the process of urban restructuring through the accumulation of everyday scenes. By presenting sites where change and continuity, development and lived experience intersect, the project challenges the perception of New York as a singular, successful global metropolis and instead interrogates the spatial and social imbalances embedded within it.

Peeling the apple seeks to peel back the surface of the city and unsettle fixed perceptions of New York City as a singular global metropolis. This project is ongoing.