Patchwork Planet

Photographer Kate Milford and author Jonathan Lethem have just collaborated on a book called Patchwork Planet. The book is published by Soft Skull Press, a small Brooklyn-based publishing house founded by the inimitable Sander Hicks, and is only available at local Brooklyn bookstore Book Court. Kate spent part of last summer volunteering as the official photographer at the Willie Mae Rock and Roll Summer Camp for Girls, which is where I had the opportunity to meet her (I shot a feature story on the camp that's appearing in the January issue of GeoLino). She's a great photographer, and a really cool person as well. And the book is fantastic. From the description on the back cover: "Kate Milford and Jonathan Lethem have together created Patchwork Planet, a portrait of the real Brooklyn—not the sepia-toned 'old' Brooklyn of the Dodgers but rather the five-and-dime downtown Brooklyn of the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties rendered in Milford’s acutely detailed large format photographs of office buildings and intersections, storefronts and shoppers, accompanied by Lethem’s whimsically personal anecdotes of chance encounters with Mad Brooklynites, of lost subway lines, and, yes of great views of the Manhattan skyline."