anne saint-pierre

“Water/Agua” is a street photography project taking place in a playground near my home in Washington Heights, a Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Northern Manhattan, between 2019 and 2024. In New York City, we call “Stonehenge effect” the quality of light at sunrise and sunset, when the sun aligns itself with the east-west streets at the winter and summer solstices. One evening in June 2019, I notice kids cooling off at the local sprinklers. Instead of exuberant joy, they are slow-moving, still, even, as if totally absorbed in the present moment, in this light and shadow theater.

I come back each year to the same place, except in 2020. I shoot first without permission; nobody says anything. Soon I wish to ask for consent. How can I do it without interrupting the flow? I find a compromise, a nod, a verbal permission from parents, sometimes in a few words of Spanish. Answering my questions, the pictures became more and more abstract, as if kids through their dance eluded my gaze, sliding instead behind the mirror of water.