Jake Price

Category: Photography

  • A 20 Year Portrait of the Anthropocene

    A 20 Year Portrait of the Anthropocene

    June 7, 2023. A lone ship made its way north on the East river. As winds blew smoke from the Canadian fires south, much of the United States has been underneath a smoky toxic fog. Air quality was the worst on record. Photographed for National Geographic.

    A 20 Year Portrait of the Anthropocene

    On May 29, 2004, I boarded a Chinook helicopter in Port-au-Prince following one of the most devastating flooding events in Haiti’s history for The New York Times. A day before, U.S. Marines, stationed on the island ostensibly to maintain peace during a time of unrest, were on a routine patrol when one of the sighters noticed something unusual: a lake that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Days earlier, there had been no sign of it. Skeptical, the pilot hesitated to investigate, but the sighter insisted, and as they flew closer, the sight was undeniable—where a village once was a lake had formed overnight after torrential rains inundated the region killing people in their sleep as cascading waters flooded down the barren hillsides. Over 200 lives were lost. At the time, I was unaware of the term Anthropocene, but it was clear we were in it.

    Over the past 20 years since descending on the submerged village,I have documented Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the devastating impacts of Hurricanes Harvey and Sandy in Houston and New York, and the smoke-cloaked skies of wildfire-stricken regions across the United States. However, no single event underscores the fragility of our future more than the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant. Though triggered by a tsunami, the disaster highlighted the broader implications of rising sea levels, which threaten to push future tsunamis and hurricanes farther inland, magnifying the risks to both infrastructure and human life.

    If these past decades are any indication, the years to come will bring more profound change. Rising sea levels will redraw coastlines, displacing millions and threatening major cities as they have already done in Fox Beach, erasing an entire New York neighborhood and returning it to nature. The cascading effects of climate change—on food security, water resources, and global migration—will intensify, demanding coordinated action on a scale never before seen.

  • Memories of the Future

    Memories of the Future

    This series is a meditation on art, history, and culture, focusing on locations most at risk from sea level rise.

    I began this series in Venice in 2020, months before the pandemic struck. When I captured these images, the president of the United States frequently extolled the the greatness of Western culture. Walking along Venice’s canals, surrounded by magnificent buildings rich with history, I couldn’t help but agree. Yet, where I diverged was in thinking: how will we protect this place—and others like it? If anything, it is our own behavior—prioritizing extraction over preservation and respect for the natural world—that threatens this civilization.

    I chose Venice as the starting point for this series because I, too, was reflecting on culture—not just Western culture, but our shared humanity, of which the West is a vital part, often unfairly vilified in the name of political correctness. We cannot separate the environment from culture, nor culture from civilization. Beyond being a meditation on how all things ascend, decay, and fall apart as part of life’s cycle, this series is a call to preserve what should not be lost too soon.

    Nearly five years later, the same president who once extolled Western culture is back in office, and Europe faces elections that could elevate leaders with similar ideologies. This work asks a crucial question: for those who proclaim the greatness of their culture, what are they doing to ensure it is passed on to future generations? How can the grandeur of centuries survive if the current leadership prioritizes extraction over preservation and neglects the health of our planet?

    During the height of the pandemic, as everything seemed to unravel, I degraded the photographs using the same seawater that now threatens our civilization. As I submerged the photos in salt water, each moment degraded in its own way—some slipped away quickly, while others decayed more slowly—it was like watching cancer patients wither away. As seas rise and civilizations burn, the responsibility rests squarely on this generation’s leaders to halt the spread of this cancer for the places we all hold dear. They cannot extol the greatness of culture while depleting the very resources that sustain it.

    Armada

    Soggiorno

    Passo

    L’Elegante

    Cameriere

    Lampada

    Gondola

    Pointe di Rialto

    L’Abito Rosso

    Visto

    Trio

  • Billion Oyster Project

    Tanasia Swift (center), the Community Reefs Regional Manager at the Billion Oyster Project takes oysters from the Paerdegat Basin in Canarsie, Brooklyn to be monitored by students who were invited to learn about the waterway and the role oysters have in it.

    The Billion Oyster Project

    Originally published in Civil Eats.

    When Hurricane Sandy struck New York on October 29, 2012, it deluged every neighborhood it hit. Seven years later, many neighborhoods—including Coney Island, Canarsie in Brooklyn, and points all along the shore of Staten Island—are still recovering. Others, such as Staten Island’s Fox Beach, were destroyed in their entirety, never to have residents again.

    With these events in all too recent memory, New Yorkers know how susceptible they are to climate change and are at the forefront of developing new approaches to the climate crisis, with the city’s young people getting especially involved. As the recent youth climate strikes that brought hundreds of thousands to New York’s streets attest, the younger generations—those who will be most affected by climate change—are taking concrete steps to try to turn back the tide, quite literally.

    One of the programs that is engaging youth is the Billion Oyster Project. While the project’s founding goal aimed to to make the “waters surrounding New York City cleaner, more abundant, more well-known, more well-loved,” it has a more pressing role in the time of accelerating climate change: creating oyster reefs that can help blunt storm surges that accompany hurricanes by breaking up the waves before they hit land.

    To date, the program has planted 28 million oysters with the help of thousands of volunteers and high school students. An offshoot of this outreach is that young people are engaging with the waterfront like never before. This has strengthened communities and led to relationships between young and old who might not have ever known each other had the climate crisis not brought them together.

    Tanasia Swift, pictured at top, is the Community Reefs Regional Manager at the Billion Oyster Project. She grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, one of the most urban places in the city. However, for as long as she can remember, she wanted to be a marine biologist. Her inseparable bond to New York’s waterways formed when she’d go to Red Hook with her father to fish as a child. She now leads efforts to install community reefs in South Brooklyn, which was badly impacted by Hurricane Sandy.

    Students from Baruch College take oysters from the Paerdegat Basin.

    On this day, Swift leads students from Public School 115 studying oysters and learning about the basin with a meditation. For her, the program is as much about regenerating community as it is about ecology. Before the students get technical knowledge, Swift wants them to develop a connection to the environment and gain an awareness of things they might not have been conscious of before.

    By closing their eyes, breathing simply and instructing them to be aware of all that their senses perceive, the children slowly take in the world around them. After they reopen their eyes, she asked them what they experienced. “I didn’t know it smelled like the ocean, we’re so close to the water, I didn’t know we were this close,” one of the students said. They would also talk about hearing birds and the water lapping against the nearby shore, things they were not aware of when their eyes were open.

    Students meditate before their discoveries.

    At first when children pick up crabs, they find their claws intimidating and drop them right away. Explaining that they need to respect the small creatures, instructors told the children they could freak out before and after they touched the crabs, but not while they touched them. After taking this advice to heart, the students took deep breaths and picked up the crabs, holding them in the pit of their palms. One girl, through giggles, said that once the crab was on her and scuttling across her skin, there actually wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

    At first when children pick up crabs, they find their claws intimidating and drop them right away. Explaining that they need to respect the small creatures, instructors told the children they could freak out before and after they touched the crabs, but not while they touched them. After taking this advice to heart, the students took deep breaths and picked up the crabs, holding them in the pit of their palms. One girl, through giggles, said that once the crab was on her and scuttling across her skin, there actually wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

    Students from PS 115 finished their day by heading down to the dock in single file where they saw oysters and creatures that live in them closer to their habitat. For the students, being outside of their school was to enter into a living laboratory. Their school is within a mile of the water, however living in urban Brooklyn it was as if the water was a world away as many had never been to it.
    The Billion Oyster Project has dozens of projects throughout New York City. One of them is 8 miles away from Canarsie in Coney Island Creek.

    The waters there are heavily polluted and there is a stench of fetid death all around. For years, the creek has been like this: home to the rotting hulls of ships and a dumping ground for discarded tires, rusting shopping carts and anything else people want to dump without being seen. However, The Billion Oyster Project hopes to change that and bring life back to this body of water. They currently have planted 160,000 oyster beds in Coney Island Creek with the goal of bringing the total to 200,000. October 29, 2012 was a pivotal date for Coney Island. It was then that Hurricane Sandy struck, transforming it from the place the world knew as home to funhouses and roller coasters to a frontline community most vulnerable to the climate crisis. In a blog post Tanasia said: “The motivations for installing a reef at Coney Island Creek have as much to do with awareness as with restoration. Some people go swimming in the creek at times when it is dangerous to do so, such as after combined sewage overflows (CSOs). Some shy away from the creek entirely, worrying that it’s always dangerous to touch the water. Part of this reef’s purpose is to provide a way for people to better get to know, and safely interact with, the water near their homes.”

    The Billion Oyster Project has dozens of projects throughout New York City, and one is eight miles away from Canarsie in Coney Island Creek, which flows into New York Harbor. The waters there are heavily polluted, and a stench hangs all around.

    Photo: Berenice Abbott from the collection of the New York Public Library. In 1937 when this photo was taken, oysters were so plentiful that they’d commonly be seen piled up along the waterways and outside of the restaurants that served them.

    In 1937, when the above photo was taken, oysters were so plentiful that they’d commonly be seen piled up along the waterways and outside of the restaurants that served them. Later, when reefs were dredged up or covered in silt and the water quality was too poor for oysters to regenerate, the reefs began to precipitously decline. Like the Coney Island Creek now, New York Harbor was toxic and nearly lifeless for more than 50 years until the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, which prohibited dumping waste and raw sewage into the harbor.

    The Billion Oyster Project partners with restaurants thought New York who donate their shells to the program after eating the oysters. Once the shells are collected, oyster larvae are placed in the shells and attached to the surface where they will then grow to become oysters themselves.

    By 2035, the Billion Oyster Project hopes to have distributed 1 billion live oysters around 100 acres of reefs, which the project says will make “the harbor once again the most productive water body in the North Atlantic and reclaim its title as the oyster capital of the world.”

    Tourists take in the last day’s light along the east river in Dumbo which was deluged when Hurricane Sandy struck. The Billion Oyster Project currently has oyster reefs just to the north of this beach. In the future new oyster reefs will populate this portion of the river to protect the place that the world knows as New York’s best location to take in the last light of day.
  • Published

    Published

    Orange skies are the future. Prepare yourself.
    National Geographic
    The Next Generation of DC Central Kitchen Chefs
    Civil Eats
    “Katrina 10 Years Later: The Photos That Moved Them the Most”
    “Fukushima: 3 Years Later”
    The New Yorker
    “How the Earth Is Reclaiming Fukushima, the Ninth Ward, and Staten Island”
    The Daily Beast
    “Gezi Park Protests”
    BBC News
    “Regenerating New York Harbor, One Billion Oysters at a Time”
    Civil Eats
    “Water in Haiti: A Source of Life & Death”
    BBC News
    “Flooding Raises New Cholera Fears in Haiti”
    The New York Times/Newsweek
    “Mexico’s Drug Wars Leave Rising Death Toll”
    NPR/Morning Edition
    “How Nourish is Still Feeding New York”
    Civil Eats
    Postcards from Tohoku: Japan, One Year Later”
    The New Yorker
    “We Lived Through a Flood. Now We Have a Very Long To-Do List.”
    The New York Time
    “An African Rice Harvest on the Hudson”
    Civil Eats
    “The Hardest Days:The Aftermath of the Japanese Tsunami”
    BBC News

  • DCCK

    DCCK

    Portraits of DCCK’s 130th Culinary Job Training Class

    Originally published in Civil Eats.

    DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), founded in 1989 by Robert Egger, began as a small community kitchen aimed at addressing immediate hunger in Washington, D.C. However, its mission extends beyond feeding the hungry; it also seeks to create long-lasting change through community-driven solutions and job creation. Students are encouraged not only to seek employment but also to become entrepreneurs and pursue their culinary ambitions as chefs in their own right.

    Beyond mastering technical expertise, many have found resilience and personal growth through self-empowerment classes led by instructor Jeffrey Rustin. “There’s a lot of pain, a lot of trauma,” Rustin said. “If you see what some of these students went through to get here, it’s just amazing. And sometimes, they’re trying to be the first one in their family to graduate from anything.”

    I spoke with the graduates of DC Central Kitchen’s 130th Culinary Job Training class about their dreams and aspirations as they were about to to step into the culinary world. As they prepare for the final phase of the program—externships in professional kitchens—the students reflect on their journey.

    The following text is by Lisa Held.

    Pamela Johnson

    Johnson’s externship at the Ritz Carlton is starting on Monday and her excitement is palpable. “I am ready!” she says, laughing. She loves baking and already sells the treats she makes, like cupcakes and chocolate-covered strawberries, to friends and family. She wants to build on that and rent her own space to open a bakery.

    Project Empowerment, a workforce development program for residents with employment barriers including lack of education, history of substance abuse, homelessness, and incarceration, pointed her toward the culinary job training program.

    Johnson said she has appreciated learning to portion dishes and breaking down chicken and fish, but she wished there was more baking included. Still, the program “really helped me stay more focused and stop worrying about everything else,” she said. “It helped me leave my drama at home when I came through the door.”

    Vincent Stewart

    Stewart started the culinary job training program in class 127 and then again in 128. “I first had my kid, I was struggling,” he said. “I was trying to come up here, but I couldn’t do it. I had to get myself together.”

    Now, he’s eager to talk about how his knife skills have improved and is about to start an externship at a hotel restaurant, which will be the last push before graduation. He’s thinking a food truck might be in his future. “[The program] gave me some confidence,” he said.

    Roshae McCraw

    At 21, McCraw has already been through a lot, including a year in prison that was the result of a situation involving domestic violence, she said.

    She’s also brimming with ideas. “I wanted to be a singer, a painter, a knitter,” she said. “And then I started cooking again.” McCraw said she loved seeing her family enjoy meals she made—like stuffed shells with ground turkey—and when another community organization suggested she apply to the culinary job training program, she decided to do it.

    She has been working on communication and expressing herself, which made her realize that her initial plan to open a restaurant wasn’t the right fit. Instead, she wants to fuse art and food in a museum environment. “You’re walking around looking at the exhibits and you can actually taste it,” she said. “That’s my dream career.” “[The program] gave me some confidence,” he said.

    Kenneth McPherson

    “I’m a better person,” McPherson says, simply, describing how his time in the job-training program has helped him with things like developing courage and a positive attitude.

    Now, he can focus on what he loves: making dishes like fried chicken, baked chicken, mac and cheese, and cabbage, and McPherson is confident he’ll have his own soul food restaurant someday.

    Given how much he’s gained through DC Central Kitchen, he also wants to give back to his community. “I want to help others who are less fortunate,” he said.] gave me some confidence,” he said.

    David Gibson

    Gibson was incarcerated for more than 28 years. In prison, he was the head cook, preparing meals for 1,800 people at a time. But in the training program, he learned a new kind of kitchen etiquette, he said. “I learned to say, ‘Yes, chef!’” he said, smiling.

    But Gibson was also open about how difficult it had been for him to stick with the training due to his struggles with alcoholism. “It’s just so hard not to drink,” he said. His housing situation was contributing to the challenge, so Rustin helped him find new housing, He also gave Gibson new responsibilities to encourage him to stay sober.

    The approach worked so well, Gibson doesn’t want to leave. He sees his future path as working for DC Central Kitchen. “The whole experience is just so beautiful,” he said.

    Quenzel Goff

    Grilled chicken, mushrooms, and asparagus. “At home, that’s all. I cook that all day every day,” Goff said enthusiastically, describing his favorite meal.

    But like Gibson, over the past several weeks, he’s been working through trauma as much as he’s been chopping and sautéing. Four years ago, his daughter passed away. “I got into trouble a couple of times in the past because I had trouble with my anger,” he said. “It kind of still haunts me to this day, because I wasn’t there for her.”

    In Goff’s mind, Rustin’s self-empowerment classes helped him even more than previous attempts at therapy did. “Once I came here and started opening up about my past, it just became more comfortable, and I started trusting,” he said. Now, Goff wants to draw on his passion for cooking for his family and previous experience acting to forge a path for himself. “My long-term goal is to find somewhere I can incorporate acting and food together,” he said.

    Dominic Rebudan

    Just three years ago, in 2019, Rebudan arrived from the Philippines. As the only immigrant in the class, one of his challenges has been communicating in English. While he speaks it fluently, he finds it difficult to express himself fully, he said.

    In self-empowerment class, he worked through a more emotional issue: forgiving his mother, who left him behind in their home country when he was a child. Rebudan said he has made significant progress, and his first priority after graduation is helping his mother fix up a house they still have in the Philippines.

    Ultimately, though, he wants to use his growing knowledge of American food to open a restaurant that fuses American and Filipino cuisine. “This is my first step to my future,” he said.

    Lavon Woods

    Raising six children of her own has been challenging, but Woods is also thinking about cooking for kids. While she ultimately wants to cook refined versions of Southern comfort food dishes, during the training program, she decided she was interested in trying out school food, first.

    “I thought, ‘Maybe I do want to be a chef, but I want to be more than that . . . by working with children and healthy eating,’” she said. She’s already working on getting the paperwork done that will allow her to apply for positions in the D.C. school system.

    Zachary Thompson

    Thompson, who also came to the program through Project Empowerment, liked learning how to break down chicken and fish, but another technique really stuck with him: making cauliflower rice.

    The test for ServSafe certification, which quizzes kitchen staff on food safety requirements and practices, was challenging, he said, but worthwhile.

    Both will come in handy as he works on getting his idea for a vegan food truck off the ground. “Right now, I’m at the stage where I’m getting all the information, and then I’ll work on the finance part,” he said. “It’s basically having a business model and a business plan. I feel more comfortable now, so I can take the next step.”

    Billy Chandler

    A caseworker at a shelter Chandler was staying at told him about the program. He had been interested in cooking after working at Henry’s Soul Food café, a D.C. institution that also recently added a job-training course.

    Chandler is so quiet you have to get very close to hear him, and getting along with everyone in the program was tough for him. Teamwork, he said, was a challenge.

    But with the new knife skills he has picked up, he said he’s ready to get to work as a prep cook or a line cook. Someday, he hopes to own a jerk chicken truck.

  • The 15 Mile Solution

    The 15 Mile Solution was originally published in Civil eats. Best viewed on desktop or tablet. For smart phone viewing please view in landscape setting.