For years, the highly anticipated Brooklyn College County Fair was held each spring, giving students the chance to showcase their clubs and raise some school funds.“It was a very big deal, you know. It was just a trip,” said Physician and Brooklyn native Seth Lewin, when reflecting on his time capturing the fair back in 1967. For Lewin, shooting on film was one of his favorite hobbies, and the campus county fair had endless subjects to photograph.
“The groups would set up on the campus lawn with these one of a kind exhibits and build these huge constructs,” Lewin said. “You would see girls in their 60s beehive hairdos with space outfits on, next to a starship enterprise. I mean it was really just a trip and a half.”
“I had always liked taking pictures, even when I was a child,” said Lewin, who attended Stuyvesant High School, where he recalled taking his first photography course. “I received some serious training in shooting film, darkroom techniques, and those sort of things, which very much piqued my interest. I stuck with it after that.”
That spring of 1967, Lewin was the president of the Brooklyn College Photo Society and the photography editor of the Kingsman student newspaper. For the fair, Lewin teamed up with a friend who was a bit more of a professional photographer and owned a Bronica, which shot on 120mm film. At the time, this was the camera to have. The cool cameras and their passion for photography drove Lewin and his friend to make a big show of photographing that particular fair in detail.
“We had to go all out, balls out, we were doing this,” said Lewin. “Since we were big photo geeks,” Lewin chuckled, “you know, in the only way that 18-year-old boys could be photo geeks, we went out and borrowed a bunch of supplies from this camera store that used to be on Flatbush Avenue.” The same store where they would get all of the film and develop chemicals for the pictures in The Kingsman.
Lewin carried his photos of the County Fair and developed them in the campus’s special darkroom, which he says was once in Ingersoll. “We used some of the prints for The Kingsman and I think people sold some of the prints here and there, but somehow I ended up with all the negatives,” said Lewin.
Decades later, those same photos will make their way back to Brooklyn College’s papers.
“These photos were all packed away and something motivated me recently to just haul it all out and scan them,” he said. “Here it is.”
