On evening walks through a wooded section of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, I began to notice dark men moving alone or in pairs through the trees, and was struck by how ghost-like their movements appeared to be. Lingering in the shadows, leaving pathways and disappearing into the overgrowth, or appearing suddenly from behind a grove of bushes, they came across as less than corporeal, and strangely enticing.
I started bringing my camera with me at dusk, and set out to track the movements of these figures. Over the successive months I became familiar to a few of the regular walkers, and developed nervy but colloquial relationships with them. We would talk about the Caribbean (a background that, it turned out, I had in common with many of them) and I would ask about their histories: how they came to be settled in the city, and what power drove them back to this forest so regularly.
I was curious about how their cultural histories, so similar to my own, could be carried within them physically, to the extent that the stigma which forbade open courtship between men in their home countries would pull them, in this more liberal American city, back into the forest, the thrill of illicitness (or was it older than that - the thrill of the hunt?) surely pumping through them again in this eden.