2011 West Indian American Day Carnival Photo Gallery | On the Road with Sesame Flyers
By September 2011, Julianspromos was beginning to move beyond its earliest experimental media stage. The platform had spent the previous year documenting New York Carnival, and just two months earlier, TEMPO Turns 6 at Six Flags Great Adventure had marked its first formal media event.
On September 5, 2011, Julianspromos returned to Brooklyn's West Indian American Day Carnival, this time documenting Sesame Flyers on the road along Eastern Parkway. The parade was the 44th annual West Indian American Day Carnival and Parade of Bands, filling Crown Heights with costumes, music and Caribbean culture.
Julian Hackett's sister, Maria J. Hackett, again helped capture the day through photography for Julianspromos under her Maria Janine Photography name. With her background in fashion and photography from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Maria focused her camera on the masqueraders, costumes and visual details that defined Sesame Flyers' presentation that year.
Back on Eastern Parkway
The 2011 gallery continued a story that Julianspromos had begun documenting one year earlier.
In 2010, during the company's founding year, Julian and Maria had covered both Sesame Flyers and Ramajay Mas during Labor Day Carnival. By September 2011, Julian had already taken another major step with Julianspromos, moving into formal event media coverage and artist interviews earlier that summer.
Returning to Eastern Parkway therefore felt different.
Julianspromos was no longer simply beginning to experiment with original media. Photography and video were becoming established parts of what the platform did.
The 2011 Sesame Flyers gallery captures that period of transition.
Maria J. Hackett Behind the Camera
For the second consecutive New York Labor Day Carnival, Maria J. Hackett helped Julian with photography.
Maria was not part of founding Julianspromos. She was Julian's sister, already trained in fashion and photography, helping him document a culture and community that had been part of their lives for years.
Working under her Maria Janine Photography name, Maria photographed Sesame Flyers' masqueraders for Julianspromos, preserving another early Carnival collection for the growing archive.
Her eye for fashion was particularly suited to Carnival.
The feathers, colors, accessories, makeup and construction of mas were not simply background elements. They became central subjects within the photographs themselves.
Photography by Maria J. Hackett for Julianspromos.
Sesame Flyers Was Already Part of Julian's Story
For Julian Hackett, covering Sesame Flyers was never simply another media assignment.
The band's mas camp had been located one block from where he grew up in Brooklyn, and Julian had experienced Sesame Flyers around Carnival season since 1997.
That childhood familiarity eventually became a working media relationship.
Beginning in 2008, Julian started doing photography and video for Sesame Flyers, continuing that work through 2015.
So when Julianspromos was on the road with the band in 2011, Julian was documenting an organization he had already known for much of his life.
The difference was that he now had a growing media platform of his own through which to preserve it.
A Different Julianspromos Than the Year Before
The space between the 2010 and 2011 Carnival galleries may have been only twelve months, but important things had already changed.
Julianspromos had officially been founded in 2010.
The 2010 Carnival gallery documented some of the earliest media work associated with the new brand.
Then, in July 2011, TEMPO Turns 6 at Six Flags Great Adventure became the first formal Julianspromos media event, opening the door to structured event coverage and on-camera interviews.
By the time Labor Day Carnival returned that September, Julianspromos had begun developing a clearer media identity.
The Sesame Flyers photographs belong to that next stage.
They capture a young platform still close to its Brooklyn roots but beginning to understand how photography, video and original coverage could become central to its future.
From a Neighborhood Mas Camp to a Media Archive
There is something fitting about Sesame Flyers appearing repeatedly in the earliest Julianspromos archive.
Long before Julian traveled to document Carnival in other cities and countries, one of the Carnival organizations most familiar to him was practically in his backyard.
The mas camp was a block from home.
He grew up experiencing the band.
He eventually photographed and filmed it.
And as Julianspromos developed, those images and videos became part of a permanent media archive.
The 2011 West Indian American Day Carnival gallery captures another point along that progression.
It connects the childhood Carnival environment Julian knew, the photography and video work he began doing with Sesame Flyers in 2008, and the emerging Julianspromos media operation of 2011.
Preserving New York Carnival 2011
The West Indian American Day Carnival took place on Monday, September 5, 2011, with masqueraders and bands traveling the traditional Eastern Parkway route through Brooklyn. Contemporary photographs from that day confirm the enormous visual spectacle of the parade and its colorful costumed bands.
For Julianspromos, however, these photographs preserve something more personal.
They show the platform continuing to document New York Carnival during one of the most important developmental years in its history.
They preserve Sesame Flyers, a band with deep connections to Julian's upbringing.
And they preserve another contribution from Maria J. Hackett, whose photography helped document those early years before the Julianspromos archive grew into something much larger.
More than fifteen years later, the photographs remain a snapshot of Julianspromos close to home, on Eastern Parkway, documenting a Carnival tradition that had been part of Julian's life long before there was a Julianspromos name attached to it.
Photography by Maria J. Hackett for Julianspromos.
