Spring Valley is a suburb of New York, 22 miles north of Manhattan. In 1996 it became home to the photographer Al J Thompson, who moved from Jamaica at the age of 16 to join his mother who had settled there. At the time, Spring Valley had, in Thompson’s memory, a thriving and vibrant African-Caribbean community, centred around Spring Valley Memorial Park, where there would be jerk chicken cook-outs and long games of cricket at weekends, and kids his age would play football until it was dark.
Back then, there were big plans to develop the land around the park with new social housing projects, building on the community that lived there, tackling some of the social problems that existed. In the years that followed, however, the social housing did not get built, the land around the park was sold to developers for private condominiums, and the familiar patterns of gentrification followed. The mom-and-pop stores on Main Street were taken over by chains, the kids who dreamed of opening music studios never raised the money. Families like Thompson’s – two-thirds of Spring Valley’s community had been black – were priced out and moved even further towards the city’s margins. By the time he returned to Spring Valley in 2017, African-Caribbean numbers had halved, there were no cricket matches or cook-outs, and the old faces he saw in the park had a more hopeless look.
His pictures of those faces, and that park, make up his first book, which he calls Remnants of an Exodus, an elegy for a diaspora community that has once again been shifted and scattered. This picture is one of the few in the book that closes in on human tenderness and connection. It sits among lone faces and tattooed torsos, chain link fences and gated housing blocks. The young couple’s kiss, in this context, seems less a closed-eye dream of possible futures, and more about might-have-beens.
Remnants of an Exodus by Al J Thompson is published by Gnomic Book, $42 (£30)
