Mara Catalán’s 1st monograph, Williamsburg, A Place I Once Called Home, is a coming-of-age story of a Spanish immigrant who moved to New York in 1990 and stayed. With little money and no concrete plan, Mara found a cheap place to live and people who cared for her in Williamsburg, an industrial neighborhood then in decline, across the bridge in Brooklyn. With a distinctive style, Mara weaves B&W urban landscapes, intimate portraits, and lyrical street scenes with stories, personal letters, and diary entries in both Spanish and English.

At once a wonderful record of a particular epoch and a historical archive of many places in Williamsburg that have either radically changed or ceased to exist, the book is a window into the life of a woman strongly connected to her changing and expanding world, and also very much tied to where she comes from. More than two decades later Mara continues to live in Williamsburg, a reluctant witness to the massive transformation and the disappearance of familiar places and faces. This book is her ode to what it once was, a place she once called home.