How the other half saw themselves: photographs and fictions on Manhattan's Lower East Side
Date
2004
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Since its invention, photography has been touted for its truth-telling capabilities; yet photographs document far greater fictions than historians commonly realize or acknowledge. Though audiences usually view the work of documentary photographers as unmitigated slices of real life, each is a carefully arranged visual description of connections between the photograph's subject, initiator, dispenser, and viewer. On Manhattan's Lower East Side, two sets of images dramatically illustrate the fictive potential of the camera: outsider photographs taken by Jacob Riis and his aesthetic descendants and family pictures taken by Lower East Side residents themselves. ☐ Careful examination of one set of photographs held at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum reveals a rich, largely untapped source for understanding the life and culture of urban immigrants. Rosaria Baldizzi, a Sicilian immigrant woman living on Orchard Street in the 1920s and 1930s, assembled a collection of photographs of her relatives, her children, her neighbors, and even herself. In producing, distributing, and preserving her pictures, Rosaria articulated changing ideas about her own identity as an Italian-American mother, devout Catholic, neighborly friend, and hard worker. In this thesis, I discuss the connections between producer, possessor, and photograph in order to understand better the cultural identity of immigrants in transition.