‘Visual medicine’: Jamel Shabazz’s evocative photos of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park

The photographer’s new book collects his pictures of the mammoth New York City park from the 1980s up until now

There is, allegedly, a commonly held belief among landscape architects familiar with New York City: for Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the designers of both Central Park and Prospect Park, the former was merely practice for the latter.

Located in Brooklyn, Prospect Park, 300 acres smaller than the Manhattan landmark, has a specifically insular quality. A surrounding urban horizon is obscured from view by old-growth forest and 175 species of trees; the park is beholden to its own rhythms, with natural waterfalls, grand lawns stretched across the borough’s glacial rock formations, and fewer adjacent towering buildings. Visiting feels like a quiet reprieve. For the Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz, Prospect Park has long been, as he writes in his newly released book, Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025, “one of my best teachers … a giver of life.”