LISA CUTLER

©Lisa Cutler/Kehrer Verlag

CLIENT: LISA CUTLER, Photographer
JOB: Short promo text for website
WHEN: December 2025

JOB: Short promo text for website

Promotional text for The Hook photobook.

I wrote a short text about the Red Hook series, for photographer Lisa Cutler, to coincide with the publication of her first monograph, The Hook: A Photographic Journey Through Red Hook, Brooklyn (Kehrer Verlag, 2025).

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The Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, is an outpost in a city of villages. It’s not a thorough-fare, nor a fully-fledged destination. This is a somewhat frontier-like enclave that you only go to if you have business there. Whilst it has ebbed and flowed with the moving tide of migration, economy, industry and culture; its history is at once rich, yet surprisingly understated. With, The Hook, Lisa Cutler presents a genuine wanderlust for her own city.

Driven by an explorer’s fascination, she adeptly examines what is essentially a disorienting urban backlot; within physical view of the Manhattan skyline, but also worlds apart.

Cutler’s photographs are formal, and sophisticated observations. These are visual documents of a built environment that, though absent of people, percolate human presence—both past and present. The photographs are elegant in their storytelling, appropriately restrained, and a smart image-rich visualization, that delve beneath the obvious surface of what we see.