Intimate City

By Richard Lacayo

Thomas Wolfe once said that only the dead know Brooklyn. He never met photographer Thomas Roma, who doesn't just live in Brooklyn, he gets it. When Roma goes to a public pool--sunstruck guys in Speedos, women unfurling on the concrete--he understands that a municipal body of water is where the eternal elements meet the here and now. When he rides an elevated subway car, he sees a cramped rectangle that's a public square, where people sign the air every time they stretch. And in the simplest black churches he recognizes that rapture is democratic, that a scuffed room is sanctified by the supreme projection of human needs in God's general direction. What he's saying is that the city is a place requiring courage and cunning. And that it's graceland.

--By Richard Lacayo