Mara Catalán

Mara Catalán’s rst monograph, Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home, is a coming-of-age story of a Spanish immigrant who moved to New York in 1990 and stayed. Liv- ing in Manhattan from day to day, with little money and no concrete plan, Mara eventually found a cheap place to live and people who cared for her in Williamsburg, an industrial neighborhood in decline, across the bridge in Brooklyn.Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home is Mara’s per- sonal record of her life there between the years of 1994 and 1996. With a distinctive style, she beautifully weaves B&W urban landscapes, intimate portraits, and lyrical street scenes with stories, personal letters, and diary en- tries in both Spanish and English.The book is at once a wonderful record of a particular ep- och and a historical archive of many places in Williamsburg which have either radically changed or cease to exist. It’s a window into the life of a woman strongly connected to her changing and expanding world, and also very much tied to where she comes from. More than two decades later Mara continues to live in Williamsburg, a reluctant witness to the massive transformation and the disappearance of familiar places and faces. This book is her ode to what it once was, a place she once called home.