Larry Racioppo was born and raised in South Brooklyn. While pursuing college and master’s degrees in the 1970s, he worked as a cabdriver, cameraman, waiter, photographer’s assistant, bartender, and carpenter. “But no matter what I did to earn money, I kept photographing and printing,” he says in his book. The result is a body of work that documents South Brooklyn between 1971 and 1983, a very different place than it is today. “I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” he adds. His work from this period has been collected in Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983, with essays by Tom Robbins and Julia Van Haaften (Cornell Univ./Three Hills). The press shared with Show Daily some of Racioppo’s photographs that depict “the intimacy and roughness of life in a working-class community of Irish-American, Italian-American, and Puerto Rican families with honesty and dignity,” says the publisher.
Friday, 11:30 a.m.–12:15 p.m. Larry Racioppo will sign books at the Cornell Univ. Press booth (757).
