In his first monograph, Yonkeros, Guatemalan photographer Jaime Permuth documents “The Iron Triangle”: Willets Point, a small and often overlooked enclave of New York City that is home to junkyards and scrap metal businesses.
“Permuth’s beautiful black-and-white photographs highlight local workers, and their tools and materials.”
Elizabeth Avedon: In the past, you’ve documented the circus performers of El Circo Rey Gitano in Guatemala. What drew you to photograph in Willets Point?
Jaime Permuth: The Guatemalan poet Alejandro Marre recently described my work as coming from the “B-side of life”. Considering these two projects, I would have to admit that there is some truth to that statement!
Circus life is like a revolving door, with people walking in and out of it constantly. The same is true of the mechanics that work in Willets Point. There is an essential mystery and poetic richness in this kind of human community. People tend to live on the margins of society and play by their own rules. In my experience, photographers are not that different. We go from one project to the next. We arrive, set up camp, and then inevitably pick up and leave so we can move on to our next destination.
For the past 40 years the mechanics in Willets Point have been locked in a battle for survival with the City of New York, which wishes to evict them and redevelop the area as mixed residential and commercial neighborhood. Occasionally there is a flare up in tensions that make it to the newspapers. One fine day in spring of 2010, curiosity got the best of me and I took a ride on the 7 train to take a look for myself. What I saw there was absolutely surreal; I felt like I had stepped back in time and found myself a figure standing in a Walker Evans landscape from the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
EA: Where is Willet’s Point in relation to Manhattan?
JP: Willets Point sits right next to Citi Field Stadium – which used to be the old Shea Stadium – home of the Mets baseball team. Across the bay is La Guardia Airport and there is a constant flow of air traffic in the skies above the junkyards. On the 7 train, it’s about a 30 minute ride into Manhattan.
The place is known as “The Iron Triangle” because it is literally shaped like one. Its area is roughly equivalent to eight city blocks, which are filled to the brim with rusting heaps of metal and spare parts. Willets Point Boulevard is the main drag. The locals refer to it as the “Road to Nowhere”.
Except for a grizzled old timer named Joe Ardizzone – who has lived there his entire life – there are no residents and the place empties out completely at night.
EA: What are Yonkeros?
JP: This book is entitled “Yonkeros” after the vernacular term that describes businesses that specialize in junk and scrap metal. The word is a corruption of the English “junk” which becomes “yonk” to the Latin ear, and is then conjugated elegantly and correctly in Spanish so that “el yonke” comes to mean the junkyard and “yonkero” the person who works with junk.
I love this word for the music in its syllables and for its vaguely epic overtones, as if alluding to some obscure and unsung hero in the Greek pantheon. But also, I find that its irregular pedigree encapsulates something essential about the immigrant story: how that which begins outside of the normative will nevertheless strive to adapt and reconcile itself to the established order, all the while creating something new in the process.
EA: Tell me about the mechanics that work there?
JP: They represent unknown quantities: strangers who drift in one day looking for work –any work- and a chance at redemption. How did they get there? How long will they stay? How well suited will they prove to be for the work at hand? Nobody really knows the answer to these questions. Some of them are heavily tattooed. If you know something about ink, you can piece together aspects of their personal stories.
By far, most of the mechanics are Latin Americans with a greater concentration of Mexicans, Ecuadorians and Dominicans than any other nationalities. However, there is also a small but significant sector of Willets Point, which is operated by Korean owners. They tend to be more high tech and high end, where the Latinos are very family and working-class oriented.
EA: What’s become of them since the old Shea Stadium was renovated and became Citi-Field Stadium?
JP: Willets Point is a contested land, and it has a long and complicated history with the City of New York, which has grievously neglected it and denied it the most basic services for decades. After years of struggle, the fight has been lost and the junkyards are now faced with their imminent demise. The city is already touting the area as its “next great neighborhood” and will redevelop it as a mixed residential and business zone. What is less clear is what will happen to the over 300 businesses that will be displaced or the working class families that depend on them for the essential service they provide.
EA: How long did you spend photographing there?
JP: I wanted to see the way the changing seasons altered the landscape of the junkyards and their impact on the working lives of the mechanics. So I photographed for one year beginning in late spring of 2010.
I shot the entire series digitally, using a Nikon D700 and an old 35mm, which is my favorite lens.
EA: How have you seen the area or NY change since you moved here in the early 90’s?
JP: New York City today is very different than the city I first encountered in the 90’s. It has become increasingly slick and ever more corporate. The gloss of fancy living has eclipsed the grit and soul that it had twenty years ago. Some people might see that as a gain, but I experience it as a loss. Where will the next generation of poets find sustenance, in the Hard Rock Cafes and Gap stores that will be built over the bones of the scrap yards? In the ersatz “Coney Island” that was conceived as a kind of sanitized theme-park version of its former grand self?
EA: Do you feel having grown up in Guatemala, you have a different perspective on how you see?
JP: I grew up in Guatemala at a time when it was exceedingly difficult to get photographic supplies. We were very careful with the film we shot and would think twice before releasing the shutter. Every photo I took was like a heartbeat in my chest, a transcription of a solitary thought or a vivid impression. Every contact sheet was heavy with images and feeling, carrying considerable gravitas.
My dad –who gave me my first camera and taught me how to use it- would always impose upon friends traveling abroad to return with a brick of black and white film and another of color transparency. These would go straight into the freezer to help keep them fresh despite the country’s heat and humidity. We would thaw them out individually, the night before shooting.
My schooling in the medium was largely a reflection of our own collection of photo books. We had monographs by Cartier Bresson, Alvarez Bravo, Brassai and Koudelka. As well as anthologies, which included Kertesz and Capa. I spent countless hours poring over the photographs and never tired of revisiting them.
But Guatemala itself probably had the greatest impact on my sensibility. It is a study in contradictions: a place of both breathtaking beauty and unspeakable violence. Its majority indigenous population is treated like a minority in its own land and has been oppressed for hundreds of years, yet they posses a depth of experience and wisdom which is truly remarkable. As for myself, I grew up as part of a minuscule Jewish community in an otherwise very devoted Catholic country. I was always an outsider.
EA: What is your background in photography? Did you study photography or assist any photographer?
JP: I come from a family of photographers, three generations to be exact. The first was my paternal grandmother, Annie Listwa. She was born in Poland at the dawn of the 20th Century, grew up in Switzerland, and immigrated with her family to Guatemala in the early 1920s. One of the few objects she brought with her was a small Kodak box camera.
If I were to describe my family, I’d say that we valued three things above others: books, long walks in the country and photographic machines. When I was a college student in Jerusalem I began exhibiting my photographs and working as freelance photographer. My passion for the medium deepened and I decided to come to New York where I completed a Masters degree at the School of Visual Arts. After graduation, I went to work as a personal printer for some remarkable photographers such as Patrick Demarchelier, Lois Greenfield, Rosalind Solomon and – most significantly in terms of my own development – Gilles Peress.
A couple of years ago I returned to SVA for a second Masters degree, this time in Digital Photography. It was a wonderful investment in myself and I acquired the skills and know-how to help me compete in a new photographic economy. A year after graduation, I hired on as Faculty in my Alma Mater and I now organize the department’s i3 Lecture Series.
Jaime Permuth: Yonkeros
La Fábrica, March 2013
Hardback, 8 x 9.75 in., 144 pages.
ISBN: 9788415303930
