The book project _Changing Queens_ explores the past, present, and future of Queens, New York as it is shaped by contrasting forces, notably the centripetal pull of Manhattan’s economy and the centrifugal push of the borough’s diversity and inequality. While the city’s capitalist core sets Queens’ overall course, the borough’s internal dynamics toss its component parts in divergent and sometimes conflicting directions. Simultaneously drawn to the center and splintering apart, Queens exhibits a disorderly dynamism as a landscape continually repurposed to meet the changing needs of both the broader city that it serves and waves of immigrants seeking opportunity within its borders. In examining this evolving scene, the project reveals the accumulated choices of a people. Few individuals appear in these photos, yet we come to know those who have made Queens through the marks that their deeds have left on the land.

_Changing Queens_ is a result of my photographic engagement with the borough in which I have lived for the last fifteen years. Moved by a desire to understand my remarkable surroundings, I turned to photography to document the landscape traces of the past, which, as a historian, I consider essential to explaining the place. My photos raised more questions than answers. This led me to research the history of Queens and write short texts in dialogue with the photos that will appear on facing pages of the resulting book. Images function in this project less as illustrations than as fragments of evidence: shards that I piece together in an attempt to solve the riddle of Queens.

_Changing Queens_ is inspired by the original manuscript of _Changing New York_ with photographs by Berenice Abbott and text by Elizabeth McCausland (1) but differs from this earlier work insofar as a single person—trained as both a photographer and historian—both makes the photos and writes the text. In explaining Queens, I aspire to unify photography and history in a single voice in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

(1) Sarah M. Miller, _Documentary in Dispute: The Original Manuscript of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elisabeth McCausland_ (Cambridge Mass.: the MIT Press, 2020).

Archival inkjet prints for the portfolio review and eventually a book for the finished project