Photoville Exhibition featuring New York Waterfront Diary

The Alice Austen House partnership with The Photoville Festival returns with community storytelling events and photo exhibitions in public spaces throughout New York City.

Sophie Fenwick is a French-American photographer, born in 1969 in New York City. She studied photography at Parsons in Paris and at the International Center of Photography in New York. She started documenting the New York waterfront in the early 1990s, following with her first solo exhibition “Entrepôts d’Eaux” (Homage to the Port of New York) at Victoire Schlumberger in Paris. Other exhibitions include shows in New York City at the Philippe Briet Gallery, Threadwaxing Space, The Seamen’s Church Institute, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Brooklyn Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn.

“I discovered the waterfront in my early twenties when I moved to Brooklyn. At the time, much of it was abandoned and falling apart. Knowing it would vanish, I felt an urge, almost a duty, to document it. Very honestly, I was secretly guided to record the landscape of where I had just landed and found myself mapping its borders, becoming familiar with it, appropriating it, becoming a part of it. I started to collaborate with the Seamen’s Church Institute in New York and Port Newark, gaining access to other locations throughout New York.”