See What Brooklyn Looked Like in the 1970s (Photos)

Before Brooklyn was known for being a hip brand and cultural hub, it was known for its blight, its working-class authenticity, its empty streets and its crime.

Photographer Dinanda Nooney was known mainly for her collection of gelatin-print portraits of people in their Brooklyn homes. But Nooney also photographed outdoors. While her intimate photos of local families, bedrooms, kitchens and parlors paint a nuanced portrait of the borough in its disco era, her photos of backyards and streets better reveal Brooklyn’s realness during the time.

In a rare series of shots depicting not home interiors but the world beyond, the late photographer captured everything from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to laundry lines and what initially looks to be an unchanged vista of the Gowanus Canal and an impossibly different Old Fulton Street.

Daughter Jill Nooney remembered her mother as being obsessed with documentation and intent on big projects and connecting with Brooklyn only on a professional level. These outdoor pictures would seem to be random images, taken to stunning effect but sparingly in the time Nooney wasn’t capturing the scenes inside homes.

This is part of a series on the late photographer Dinanda Nooney, whose full collection of Brooklyn photographs are available online via the New York Public Library’s archives.

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Disco-Era Brooklyn: Photographer Dinanda Nooney’s Portraits of People in Their Bedrooms
“She Was in Charge of Brooklyn”: Dinanda Nooney’s Daughter on Brooklyn and Her Mother
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