Recently Abraham Ravett dug out his old photos from Brighton Beach in the 1980s, and published a book of them. You can click through for a preview, and below, a little history of the man behind the lens.
Abraham and his family moved to Brooklyn in 1955, after living in a tent at a refugee camp in Israel. At first they lived in a tenement apartment in Brownsville, and eventually (around 1960) moved to Brighton Beach—to "a block of new, twenty-two story, Le Corbusier knock offs, complete with handball courts and ocean views. Trump Village it was called. A clean, bright place with no past."
While he moved out in 1968, after starting his job teaching science in Bed-Stuy, his parents remained in the apartment through 1996.
These photos were taken during his visits back between 1982 and 1984, all documenting the area, including his former neighbors, the boardwalk, and the urban landscape of the neighborhood. (During that time he also took a pretty significant amount of video footage, which you can preview here and here.) He says, "thirty years later, these photographs have also become a visual embrace of the landscape that shaped my youth."
