POTW: A Decade in the Life of a Brooklyn Photographer: the Laura Fitzpatrick Collection

Today’s Photo of the Week comes from the collection of Laura Fitzpatrick, who began taking pictures at age 11 of her friends, family and neighbors in Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, during the years 1938-1948.

Our photo depicts Laura and her mother Elizabeth standing on a Brooklyn street, elegantly dressed and coiffed. Behind them we see a line of storefronts and a man breezing by in a wide cap. In the distance is the edge of a neon sign which we know from other photographs in the collection reads Parkside Bar, revealing the location as Union Avenue in Williamsburg. Only barely visible on the curb to their right is a cart, drawn either by hand or horse. The year is 1943.

The 409 photographs in this collection are reproduced from an album assembled by Laura and donated by her family in 2016 to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History.

Laura Fitzpatrick was born in Mount Meigs, Montgomery, Alabama in 1927. In 1937 she and her mother Elizabeth moved to Brooklyn and lived with Elizabeth’s aunt, Winnie Pegues, for about one year. They then moved to their own apartment at 635 Broadway in Williamsburg. When Laura was eleven years old, her mother bought her an Agfa Billy camera and Laura started in a systematic way documenting her friends, family and places they frequented from 1938-1948.

Laura’s son, Daniel Evans, who provided much background information to describe the collection, said that his mother took her camera everywhere, becoming the de facto documentarian of the neighborhood because most people did not have cameras. We see Laura and her friends grow from teenagers to young adults in front of their homes, in parks, at the beach, and on the roof of her building. Almost all the photographs are taken outdoors where she could find ample light for good photographic exposures. She often photographed people on Sunday after they came from church when she knew they would be dressed in their Sunday best. The 1940s was a time of more formal fashions: hats, gloves and fitted jackets. Several young men are spotted in zoot suits. Even the middle schoolers look sophisticated and older than their years. The photographs show people at their most confident and relaxed and are a tribute to the strong relationship between photographer and subject. We see her sophisticated understanding of when to release the shutter to get the most characteristic expression and pose, and how to frame a shot. Laura, in turn, enlisted others to record her so we get to see her mature, along with her friends, from young teenager to young adult.

After arriving in Brooklyn, Elizabeth found domestic work in Manhattan and studied at night to become a dressmaker and made woman’s coats. She sewed many of the suits and coats we see worn in the photographs.

As an adult, Laura sought opportunities to become a professional photographer but, finding none, enrolled in the YWCA School of Practical Nursing at 30 Third Avenue, Brooklyn. She graduated around 1948, married Ernest Evans in 1951, and had four children. Later, she studied to become a registered nurse at Hostos Community College in the Bronx, graduating in 1970. She worked as a nurse at Brooklyn’s Brookdale Hospital for 33 years, and retired to Fayetteville, NC where she died in 1987. 

You can see all of the Laura Fitzpatrick photographs on our digital collections page.

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at cbhreference@bklynlibrary.org.