Notes From West Brighton pairs two series of black and white photographs of one locale created a decade apart. After losing her Manhattan loft during the real estate boom of the early 1980s, Osinski moved from lower Manhattan to the West Brighton neighborhood of “the forgotten borough” of Richmond County, better known as Staten Island.

Osinski took to its streets and byways as a reporter and spy, exploring, observing and recording one of the least noted areas of New York City and its working-class culture. Having come from a similar background, this proved the perfect intersection between photographer and subject. Though Staten Island’s culture and topography are as subject to change as the rest of the metropolis, Osinski’s depictions of it and its inhabitants appear almost out of time.

Her work continues the tradition of earlier New York School photographers who visually eavesdropped on the City, capturing private moments in public. Exhibited for the first time, Notes From West Brighton includes Walking Staten Island 1983-1984 and Staten Island Shoppers 1993-1996. Osinski created the Walking Staten Island series while roaming the borough with a 4×5 camera on a tripod. Ten years later, she took a medium-format camera into grocery aisles, discount stores and malls to produce Staten Island Shoppers, pointing and shooting the camera without using the viewfinder.

Despite these very different technical approaches and the significant interval between the two projects, Notes From West Brighton has a startling visual unity. Osinski’s island is home to the uncanny—time and form, oddly arrested. The two series shown in tandem give the impression of Richmond County as a collective dream as much as historical document.

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