“I started to see what had always been before me, but I’d never noticed.”

Photographer/author Anna Angelidakis talks about her personal journey of discovery in New York City’s community 

My father, a Greek Merchant Marine sea captain, passed away in 2008 while I was living in New York’s Lower East Side. Looking for quiet places to gather my thoughts, I noticed a welcoming sign, “The garden is open.”  Little did I know how this small step would change my life.

I learned how many buildings in the city’s low-income areas had been devastated in the ’60s and ’70s. Left unattended, burned, and reduced to rubble, they became havens for drug dealers, gangs, and junkies.

However, neighborhood residents rose up—ordinary people, dreamers, artists, and activists alike. They cleared those empty lots, planted trees, flowers, and vegetables. Vital parts of their neighborhoods, today they continue to be sites of performances, workshops, weddings, birthdays, graduations, and memorials. And, often, fresh vegetables.

Between 2009 and 2019, I photographed so many of these urban gardens, and the local people who continue to create, maintain, and enjoy them. In the process, Rooted in the Hood was born—a book showcasing 48 of the more than 150 gardens I photographed, which inspired this exhibition.

The New York City I thought I knew reinvented itself, and I rediscovered her from the ground up in the most profound way. I invite you, in some small way, to do the same.

Anna currently lives in her native Athens, Greece