Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983

by Larry Racioppo (Photographer), Larry Racioppo (Photographer), Tom Robbins (Primary Contributor), Julia Van Haaften (Primary Contributor)

New
Illustrated
2018
$50.66

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.

Synopsis

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.

$50.66

Quantity

6 in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 176
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Three Hills
Published: 15 Sep 2018
ISBN 10: 1501725874
ISBN 13: 9781501725876

Media Reviews

Brooklyn Before is a delight. I see visual threads from many of Larry Racioppo's projects intersecting these photographs: the car fins, the plaid pants, the boom box. The effect is to convey an urban grittiness that was authentic working-class reality in this patch of Brooklyn. Fantastic!

-- Jan Ramirez, Chief Curator, National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Brooklyn Before offers a glimpse of a forgotten Brooklyn and captures the grit, diversity, and community of South Slope in the 1970s, before the influx of boutique coffee shops and multi-million-dollar rehabbed brownstones. Larry Racioppo's images focus on working class families and communities during a challenging historical moment for New York City.

-- Natiba Guy-Clement, Manager of Special Collections-Brooklyn Collection, Brooklyn Public Library

If you're born and raised in Brooklyn like me, the rhythms and attitudes within Larry Racioppo's photographs are like voices of old friends: They return you to your truest self. If you're not, these images invite you into inscrutably odd and cool neighborhoods. Walking the same turf Racioppo mapped out, as I do each day, reveals scant evidence of what his camera captured. Before these streets became hip to hipsters and real to realtors-before Brooklyn became a brand-they contained worlds now nearly vanished. When I open this book, these worlds spring defiantly back to life.

-- Larry Blumenfeld, Jazz critic and culture reporter

In this eye-popping jewel of a book Larry Racioppo immortalizes the Park Slope Brooklyn where I was raised before it lost its unique character when it lost its unique characters. Brooklyn Before is as close as we can get to saving what was once a glorious working class Brooklyn.

-- Denis Hamill, former Daily News columnist and author of Fork in the Road

The streets shown here take me back to when I first lived in Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is wonderful to revisit that vibrant ethnic urban life in Larry Racioppo's amazing photographs. As I pored over the pages, I was once again impressed how this wonderful borough has always been a place for immigrants, the home of aspiring working-class and middle-class families. Before Brooklyn shows us the past and holds lessons for the future.

-- Tupper W. Thomas, founding President of the Prospect Park Alliance

Author Bio

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. Tom Robbins reported on New York City for more than thirty years for the Daily News, the New York Observer, and the Village Voice. Cellblock Justice, his series on violence in New York prisons, produced in collaboration with The Marshall Project and the New York Times, was named a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting and won the 2016 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism. He teaches investigative journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Julia Van Haaften is a consultant on photography and museum collections. She has written widely on photography history and curated a score of exhibitions. Her biography of the photographer Berenice Abbott was published in early 2018 by W. W. Norton. Van Haaften was the founding curator of the photography collection at the New York Public Library, from 1980 to 2001, before joining its Digital Library Program. She served as director of collections at the Museum of City of New York from 2005 until her retirement in 2010.