Tar Beach : Life on the Rooftops of Little Italy
Bologna: Damiani, 2020.
ISBN: 9788862087223
Condition: Fine
Hardcover
First Edition
SIGNED by Susan Meiselas and Martin Scorsese
84 pp, 17 color & 67 bw. 6 x 8.5 inches
Found family photographs from New York's Little Italy portray a vanished way of life In Tar Beach, photographer and Little Italy resident Susan Meiselas brings together found pictures that were made, kept and gathered by various families who handed them down from 1940 to the early 1970s. Reflections from the community offer perspectives of multiple generations, as local author Angel Marinaccio says: “If you had an accomplishment—communion, confirmation, wedding, graduation or birthday, you‘d dress up in your best outfit and go to the rooftop to take pictures and celebrate with your family.” Meiselas, along with two of her neighbors, Angel Marinaccio and Virginia Bynum, collected and curated these vernacular photographs and memories to convey the feeling of this special place and time in the daily lives of Italian immigrants as they made their way to becoming part of American culture. Martin Scorsese, who grew up in the neighborhood, writes in the Introduction: “The roof was our escape hatch and it was our sanctuary. The endless crowds, the filth and the grime, the constant noise, the chaos, the claustrophobia, the non-stop motion of everything … you would walk up that flight of stairs, open the door, and you were above it all. You could breathe. You could dream. You could be.”. Item #20020
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