When Katsu Naito, a newcomer to Harlem, worked up the courage to ask if he could take his neighbors’ pictures, no one said no.
When Katsu Naito worked up the courage to ask if he could take his neighbors’ pictures, no one turned him down.
In 1983, at the age of eighteen, Katsu Naito left his small Japanese city of Maebashi, in the Gunma Prefecture, and headed to the United States. “New York City is a place for kids like you to go and get disciplined,” his mother had told him as she scanned ads for overseas job offers. He didn’t argue. At the time, Naito’s greatest love was disco, and his mother, unwittingly, was ushering him straight to its center. For his first three years in the U.S.
In the spring of 1988, Naito moved to 112th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, in Harlem. It was the height of the crack epidemic. The remains of burned and demolished buildings dotted the neighborhood. From the window of his third-floor apartment, Naito watched money disappear into the Lucite turnstile windows of a deli and little brown paper bags pop out. Inside, the store’s shelves stocked only some laundry detergent and a few cans of food.
For months, Naito spent his days off walking up and down Lenox Avenue, with either his Nikon F3, or his Leica CL, or, later, his Pentax 67 slung over his shoulder, but he didn’t take any photos. When he bought a small tripod for the Pentax, he carried that in plain sight, too, continuing his rounds without once clicking the shutter. Gradually, he began noticing the same faces in the same spots. Eventually, they began to recognize him. Now the neighborhood kids asked what he was up to.
In the years he lived and photographed in Harlem, Naito also made portraits of trans streetwalkers and sex workers in the meatpacking district. He lives in East Harlem now and continues to photograph throughout the city, but until recently he had shelved the pictures of his neighborhood. “I spent a lot of time printing, to get the emotional quality I wanted to achieve. I would get attached to each negative,” he said. “The funny thing is, you remember exactly how you shot them.
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