For over 40 years, Hazel Hankin has documented life on the bustling city streets, in the clubs, and across borders.
Hazel Hankin has spent over four decades capturing cities and their subjects: dancers mid-spin, strangers on the go, abandoned architecture. Her photography reflects a commitment to documenting people in their natural environment, always perceptive to the magic of the fleeting.
Hankin began photographing as a college art student in the 1970s at Brooklyn College. Raised in Flatbush and later immersed in the bohemian energy of Park Slope, she developed her eye during a time of social and political upheaval. Her first intentional project took place in Coney Island, where she spent the summer of 1977 documenting the beach, boardwalk, and characters that populated her childhood amusement park. Over the years, she continuously returns to the amusement park, documenting its transformations.
In 1992, the City College of New York, where she has been teaching photography for thirty five years, stopping only a few years ago, invited her to participate in an architecture exchange program in Cuba.
What began as documentation for the group evolved into a long-term photographic project on Cuba’s National Art Schools–subversive structures that were never completed but stand as symbols of utopian hopes. Her time in Cuba coincided with the Special Period, a period of economic decline. She witnessed the Cuban people struggle to meet their basic needs while watching achievements in art and education crumble.
Throughout the 1990s in Havana, she photographed the people’s lives up close, a unique perspective most foreigners could not access. She even photographed Muhammad Ali’s five-day humanitarian aid tour of the city in 1996.
New York’s spirited social dance community is another world that Hankin captures from its core. Mi Mambo, her ongoing series on Latin dancing, blends her passions for music, Latin dancing, and photography.
She approaches dance photography similarly to street photography. They both involve capturing a moment of peak intensity amidst movement and fluidity. “I’ve learned by experience to sense where a moving subject may be heading within the frame and, with luck, to freeze the action at the right instant.”
“Being a dancer myself, I know the movement patterns and what it feels like to experience the music, motion, and non-verbal communication with a partner.”
As both a participant and observer of the scene, she is attuned to the moments of rhythmic intimacy between dancers. “Being a dancer myself, I know the movement patterns and what it feels like to experience the music, motion, and non-verbal communication with a partner,” she said.
Her Mi Mambo photos showcase the cultural and generational diversity that fuels her work. The desire to dance unites the dancers, no matter how different their lives may be. “Everyone is seeking the same thing: the exhilarating satisfaction of finding that groove with another person — the perfect dance,” she said.
Today, Hankin lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, a neighborhood as lively as her images. “It’s an incredibly diverse neighborhood with a fascinating and vibrant street life,” she said. “I love doing street photography here.”
In addition to photographing her neighborhood, she is currently scanning and organizing her archives—decades of images that still feel urgent and relevant. “When I look at the photos now, mundane scenes can resonate in another way,” she said. “I look at the people in my photos and wonder where their lives ended up taking them.”
For Hankin, the power of photography is its reminder that “situations and environments we’re in undergo big changes, but human beings–who we are, what we need and care about–remain always the same,” she said.
Whether it’s the political climate in Cuba, generations of Latin dancers, or pockets of New York City, change is inevitable. Hankin captures the unchanging hearts of these subjects
“The main through line in my work is an interest in people and their relationships with each other, their environment, and the larger society,” she said.
Though much has changed since she began, her fuel for photography remains consistent: the pursuit of that impromptu frame that reveals something about our world. “The pull is the tantalizing possibility that with luck, you might capture a magical moment when all the elements – framing, light, subject details – come together in perfect confluence,” said Hankin.
Home page Philadelphia, PA 1976 and Top image; Friends, Park Slope, Brooklyn 1978. All images, copyright Hazel Hankin.
