What's the Hook? seeks to document the changes in Red Hook by exploring the question "What does Red Hook mean to you?" The purpose of What's the Hook? is to encourage participants and viewers to remember, reflect, and redefine their own neighborhood.
What is the very first image that comes to mind when you hear Red Hook, Brooklyn? Is Red Hook the sum of its history, or is it the potential the future holds? Is it how we play, how we work, or how we get around? Is it our friends and our families, our homes or our workspaces? Is it the views or the light, the architecture or the gardens, the dawn or the dusk, new construction or rubble?
What is changing? What will never change?
Red Hook has always inspired documentation. Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront and Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. More recently, Gabriel Cohen's Red Hook and Matty Rich's Straight Outta Brooklyn. Theyhave all tried to capture a neighborhood that has been beautiful and threatening, magnetic and repulsive, comforting and confining.
What’s the Hook? provides a window into what today’s Red Hook means to the individual members of this diverse neighborhood. Equally important, What's the Hook? hopes that these images will inspire conversations among residents and visitors alike.
We still need volunteers to help review images, mount the exhibitions and more. To get involved, email whatsthehook2007@gmail.com
