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    Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983
    Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983
    Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983
    Ebook142 pages41 minutes

    Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983

    By Larry Racioppo, Tom Robbins and Julia Van Haaften

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    About this ebook

    Before Brooklyn rose to international fame there existed a vibrant borough of neighborhoods rich with connections and traditions. During the 1970s and 1980s, photographer Larry Racioppo, a South Brooklynite with roots three generations deep, recorded Brooklyn on the cusp of being the trendy borough we know today.

    In Brooklyn Before, Racioppo lets us see the vitality of his native Brooklyn, stretching from historic Park Slope to the beginnings of Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park. His black and white photographs pull us deep into the community, stretching our memories back more than forty years and teasing out the long-lost recollections of life on the streets and in apartment homes. Racioppo has the fascinating ability to tell a story in one photograph and, because of his native bona fides, he depicts an intriguing set of true Brooklyn stories from the inside, in ways that an outsider simply cannot. On the pages of, Brooklyn Before the intimacy and roughness of life in a working-class community of Irish American, Italian American, and Puerto Rican families is shown with honesty and insight.

    Racioppo's 128 photographs are paired with essays from journalist Tom Robbins and art critic and curator Julia Van Haaften. Taken together, the images and words of Brooklyn Before return us to pre-gentrification Brooklyn and immerse us in a community defined by work, family, and ethnic ties.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThree Hills
    Release dateSep 15, 2018
    ISBN9781501726781
    Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983
    Author

    Larry Racioppo

    Larry Racioppo, born and raised in South Brooklyn, is the author of a previous book of photography, Halloween. He received a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Graham Foundation. Racioppo’s photographs are in numeours collections, including the Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, El Museo del Barrio, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

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      Book preview

      Brooklyn Before - Larry Racioppo

      Preface

      When I returned to Brooklyn in December 1970, after two years in California as a VISTA volunteer, I had no plans and a thirty-dollar camera I barely knew how to use. I was twenty-two years old and I wanted to become a photographer.

      I took a course at the School of Visual Arts, a job with the telephone company, and I began to photograph my family and friends in South Brooklyn. I rented a small storefront in Sunset Park to set up a darkroom where I could make my own black-and-white prints. Eventually I returned to college and graduated. Over the next few years, I completed a master’s degree and worked as a cab driver, cameraman, waiter, photographer’s assistant, bartender, and carpenter. But no matter what I did to earn money, I kept photographing and printing, gradually creating a body of work rich in the feel of time and place—South Brooklyn in the 1970s.

      Looking back now, I smile when I think of my eager young self. I walked around South Brooklyn with my Nikon rangefinder and a handheld light meter, recording each exposure in a 2 × 3-inch spiral notebook. I photographed whatever interested me—from kids playing in the street to old men sitting in bars, from strangers on the subway to my relatives in their homes.

      The photographs I made between 1971 and 1983 document South Brooklyn before its gentrification. My parents and most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins lived there. To me, our neighborhood stretched from historic Park Slope to the beginnings of Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park. But I photographed most often between 3rd and 22nd Streets, between 4th to 8th Avenues. I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification. Slowly but surely, the residential gold rush expanded south from Park Slope. As home prices and rents rose and the pace of sales increased in the1970s, realtors began to call this area the South Slope. The frontier boundary gradually moved toward Green-Wood Cemetery, from 3rd Street to 9th Street to 15th Street and beyond with new neighborhood names like Greenwood Terrace and Greenwood Heights.

      But back in 1972, when I rented an apartment on 15th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, a few blocks from my family’s first home, which was demolished in 1954 for the construction of the Prospect Expressway, my neighbors and I had no idea of the changes to come. I went about my work as a photographer and, at home, converted the bedroom to a darkroom and the living room to a small studio for portraits and still lifes. Although I worked as an assistant in a Manhattan photo studio, I became a street photographer long before I knew what that phrase meant. I took frequent walks with my camera from Prospect Park to Green-Wood Cemetery to Sunset Park and photographed religious processions, political parades, and street fairs in South Brooklyn.

      These public events were also personal because the social life of my large Italian American family revolved around the Catholic liturgical calendar. Holy days like Christmas and Easter were holidays. Baptisms, first Communions, confirmations, and weddings were religious sacraments celebrated like birthdays—festive dinners with cakes and presents. The Puerto Rican families moving to South Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s were Catholics, too, and influenced local churches, such as St. John’s on 21st Street, to have a more active liturgy. Street processions, like the one on Good Friday, became more elaborate and much more interesting to me.

      Working with both 35mm and 120mm black-and-white film, I continued photographing the everyday life of my family and neighbors. Best of all, I photographed local kids playing the same city games I had played as a boy: football, stickball, punchball, handball, and basketball. I often gave them 8 × 10-inch prints and they called me Picture Man, which I took as a great compliment.

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