Best known for his work documenting war and suffering around the world, photographer Q. Sakamaki’s new book, Tompkins Square Park, shows his earlier work in a place so close yet so far away: the Lower East Side well before there were $10 million penthouses on Avenue C. The NY Times talks with Sakamaki about his experiences documenting the community’s struggle against gentrification and sometimes simply to survive.

“Upon arriving in the city in 1986 he settled in the East Village, where he was alternately charmed and horrified by what he found. Dilapidated and abandoned buildings lined the streets. Entire blocks were filled with little more than rubble and bricks. Heroin was sold in candy stores, and gunshots sounded in the night. In the morning he sometimes spotted the bodies of people who had been killed or had died of overdoses.”

Being launched tonight from 6:30 to 9 PM at the powerHouse Arena (37 Main Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn), Sakamaki’s book “focuses on Tompkins Square Park as the symbol and stronghold of the anti-gentrification movement, the scene of one of the most important political and avant-garde movements in New York history.”

Photos by Q. Sakamaki via NYT