During this week’s Feature Fridays, we’re excited to bring you Peter Puleo, a native Brooklynite and NewYorkophile. Peter has a unique perspective on the borough through photography. His photos beautifully capture the emotions of the borough through documenting living history through the lens of someone rooted in old Brooklyn. He’s also known to be quite the adventurer and ventures out to get pictures from places not often seen. I’ll let you learn about him through his answers and photos.

Check out the interview below and more of his work on his Flickr stream!

For the Love of Brooklyn: What is the story you try to tell with your photography?
Peter Puleo: The original story I was trying to tell behind my photography began as a documentary project of my forgotten community living in the shadow of the greatest city in the world. That genre of shooting, I believe, has remained evident in my work as I always try to capture the lost moments and emotions of the city — particularly the “outer” borough communities – usually at night, and particularly in inclement weather. Another story one may pick up on is more historical as I try to blend the past into the present day through similarities in lifestyles and social habits/customs. Eventually joining the internet community, I became exposed to many new and fascinating styles and concepts of photography. It always blows my mind how many people show such original talent to what for so long was ignorantly considered the easiest of all arts. There are many amazing and talented individuals displaying their work not only on Flickr but also on so many blogs and internet forums too. It is truly a learning experience of which I have become a perpetual student.

LoB: As a native Brooklynite/New Yorker, how does your view behind the lens change as you move between boroughs?
PP: My view behind the camera lens does not change anywhere I go. As much as I love Brooklyn, if I find something, I believe worth showing to the world outside of Brooklyn, I will photograph it. I believe Brooklyn has definitely had a huge effect on my approach to photography and especially people because I try not to be judgmental of anyone I photograph and always try in some way to create a dignity in all my shots, whether it is a sad lost pride or a stoic individual. I have had conversations with virtually all the folks I have shot and for a few, I know their life stories, which I try to bring out as much as possible in only one or two shots.

LoB: If each borough of New York City was a different kind of camera format, what would Brooklyn be and why?
PP: This is a question that requires a lot of thought. Here at this time I am going to say Large Format because these cameras are still the very much used by the photo industry in the professional areas of Fashion and Landscape photography. Brooklyn as a landscape is a cornucopia of the world transplanted to a small corner of Long Island and part of the greatest city in the world. In this landscape you can see a microcosm of America and also very much in evident is the best and worst of what our society has to offer; it makes it a truly unique place. From a fashion standpoint, Brooklyn is a voyeur’s paradise and probably one of the best people-watching places in the world. Fashion cannot happen without people and if there is one thing that has always been Brooklyn’s greatest export, it has been our people. We definitely march to our own tune.

LoB: You primarily have been shooting film, but have been known to use digital on occasion.  How does your photography change when you’re using one or the other?
PP: Film was the format I was introduced to from a young age when I was given a Polaroid Spirit600 on my 5th birthday — probably my favorite camera at that young age.  By the time I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time with a Ricoh point-and-shoot and then got my first digital camera at age 19 – the Canon SD500 Elph. I spent a lot of time with that camera until I started taking film photography courses in college and started using my dad’s Minolta SRT201 and Pentax K1000 – a camera I still use quite frequently.

Using film keeps me grounded to the basic fundamentals of photography being a fine art; I find that if you do not get to see the finished product of what you are shooting immediately, it will make you more critical and picky of your art and quite possibly create a unique style of what you shoot. I find that when I shoot film, my pictures speak more on their own because I invested more passion and thought into taking that one shot, knowing there cannot always be a do-over. On a more opinionated point of view, I love the technicolor quality of many films, particularly low-speed slide film. Many of my more recent film pictures posted on Flickr were shot with 100 speed Fuji Velvia and I try to expose the differences in my photostream between that and the digital and cell phone pictures I occasionally post.

LoB: You probably know Brooklyn better than anyone in the world (at least anyone under 30).  How did you gain the knowledge and would you ever consider giving walking tours?
PP: WOW! That is quite a compliment. I would not say I know Brooklyn better than anyone, even in my mid-20s age group. There is relatively small but very dedicated group of all-ages Newyorkophiles, one might call us. Brooklyn was basically introduced to me as a very young kid by a couple of factors. First and foremost, my paternal grandmother, a Bushwick native, bestowed quite a bit of borough pride on me. Her dignity in not fleeing the neighborhood like so many of her neighbors was very admirable to me as a kid. My father came of age amidst quite a bit of different worlds in what was a very tumultuous 1960s Brooklyn and the characters who were his friends and their stories left an undeniable impact on my life.

Another major factor would be the Canarsie neighborhood in which I grew up during the 1990s and 2000s. Without a doubt, it is a sociologist’s dream – the community was an amazing mix of old bourgeois Brooklyn families, established German and Italian Americans, a large displaced Jewish community fleeing neighboring Brownsville beginning in the 60s, and rapidly growing Caribbean and Asian immigration populations beginning in the late 1980s. This environment lent the neighborhood quite an old-fashioned working class cosmopolitan flair not really found in the city in such recent history. The history behind that world started emerging with all the amazing artifacts I started finding by strolling through my own neighborhood as a young teen. And many fascinating stories from a very large number of old-timers living around me who came from all over Brooklyn, America and the World only made me hungry for information. It has become a very serious affair since then.

Many times I have mulled over the possibility of conducting walking tours here in Brooklyn and actually on occasion I have had the pleasure of assisting my friend Adam Schwartz, a very well-known and respected historian and school teacher right here in Brooklyn! His page on Flickr is http://www.flickr.com/photos/11290907@N03/

Will I conduct tours in the future is a question I honestly have not answered myself. I do not think I can go at it alone because I wouldn’t know where to begin as there is so much out there. But if anyone out there is ever interested in pursuit of this endeavor, feel free to contact me. [Ed. note: Hints might be dropping all over. Tell us here where you want the next tour and walk to happen!]

LoB: An extra one for fun: What is the best subway line, and best model train?
PP: This is a tough one for me, haha. Growing up, my father used to have off on Wednesdays and Sundays and around the age of 5-7, every Wednesday after school we would take a random trip on a different subway route here in Brooklyn (LIRR too). One of my favorite trips was taking the (D) train to Coney Island (It used to be called the Brighton local). However, being from Canarsie, the (L) would be my train. If I had to pick a subway line as the best in the whole city, then it would be between the (A) and (J). The (A) traverses the city from the top of Manhattan to the seaside peninsula – a fabulous ride indeed but it only passes through Brooklyn and underground at that. The (J) and (L), on the other hand, only make 5 stops in Manhattan and spend the bulk of their run on the old BMT lines. The (J) is all elevated in Brooklyn and is a wonderful throwback to the days of the massive elevated transit empires of the New York of yore.

The subway train models that were my favorites were recently retired last year and they were the ambitious Slant R40 and the classic R38.

Thanks so much to Peter for the fantastic interview and have a great weekend!