Thomas Wolfe once said that only the dead know Brooklyn. He never met photographer Thomas Roma, who doesn't just live in Brooklyn, he gets it. When Roma goes to a public pool--sunstruck guys in Speedos, women unfurling on the concrete--he understands that a municipal body of water is where the eternal elements meet the here and now. When he rides an elevated subway car, he sees a cramped rectangle that's a public square, where people sign the air every time they stretch. And in the simplest black churches he recognizes that rapture is democratic, that a scuffed room is sanctified by...
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