PASSAGE: The Memory Palace  by Hugh Crawford

The goal of this project was to photographically combine items from the Brooklyn Public Library collections, paper ephemera . books, catalog cards and other mementos from and of the library's past with the library's latest technological offerings. PASSAGE: The Memory Palace   uses photographic images somewhat in the manner of allegorical genre painting and as objects in the mnemonic device known as the memory palace. The term Memory Palace of course also describes the library and it's collections just as passage can describe the space where the artwork is installed as well as the passage of time.

In the middle of the project Hurricane Sandy blew through the borough of Brooklyn and changed the project to some extent. Water became a theme as I had just discovered that the Brooklyn Public Library is located next to a former reservoir and the wave motif is used in the wall behind the library. The Brooklyn Public Library collection of Coney Island ephemera, my ongoing interest in Coney Island and Hurricane Sandy's impact on Coney Island made Coney Island an obvious focus rich in history and metaphor.

An online zoom-able version of the murals can be found here


I was only able to use a tiny percentage of the material I gathered, here are some outtakes

More pages from the Coney Island House guest register

The rest of the Jay Ward program

Severe weather photographs from The Brooklyn Daily Eagle morgue