c. 2006 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ The mean streets of New York might not seem a likely place to discover the sacred.
But amid the city’s fabled profane _ the grit of a boulevard or an underpass, the grime of a storefront sidewalk or a subway station _ the sacred exists. You just have to be open and alert to it.
For more than 30 years, a New York photographer has been just that. Bracingly but lovingly, Larry Racioppo has captured the ways religious faith _ often the private faith practiced among the city’s black, Latino and Italian residents _ spills out publicly into the streets of New York’s five boroughs.
A summer-long exhibit at New York’s Museum of Biblical Art _ “The Word on the Street” _ has drawn attention to the unusual career of Brooklyn native Racioppo, 58. His sharp eye and sensitivity have produced a remarkable and distinctive chronicle of New York City: everyday expressions of religious faith as experienced on Gotham’s streets, particularly its poorer corners.
Racioppo, educated at Fordham University in the Bronx after growing up in a predominantly Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, was naturally drawn to the rhythms of street life when he began photographing the city in the early 1970s.
After holding down “every odd job in the city” to support himself, Racioppo started in 1989 as photographer for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. That job has given him remarkable access to the range of life within the city. A one-year sabbatical in 1997 on a Guggenheim Fellowship gave Racioppo the opportunity to deepen his craft and widen his vision. “I did five to six years of work that year,” he said.
Much of Racioppo’s total output has nothing to do with religion or expressions of faith per se. But enough of it has to constitute a strong, elemental theme in his work.
“In its diversity, it’s typical New York,” said Patricia Pongracz, the museum’s chief curator and the organizer of the exhibit. And what Racioppo’s photography chronicles _ street memorials to the dead, graffiti, murals, even tattoos and jewelry _ is proof that expressions of religious faith need not be limited to places of worship.
“There are vestiges of faith in very unlikely places,” Pongracz said of the “improvised” and “ephemeral” forms of faith Racioppo sees on the street. “You expect to find it in a church, but it’s also there where you look.
“There are people who make faith a daily part of their lives,” she said _ and they express that faith in a multitude of ways.
Street murals, like the one that memorializes a Brooklyn man named Mike with a depiction of the archangel Michael, are one such expression. In Racioppo’s photographs, they emerge as eloquent, full-scale pieces of art.
The many ways religious faith becomes a part of everyday work life are found in other expressions, be it a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the arm of a young Mexican pizzeria worker (“Casanova Pizzeria Counterman”) or the open toolbox of a tin knocker (“Tin Knocker’s Toolbox”) that has an illustration of Jesus taped to the inside. Both elevate a “humble, everyday object to the level of a portable devotional shrine,” said Dolores DeStefano, another museum curator.
Then there are Racioppo’s photographs of some of the city’s hair salons. The Cristo Rey (Christ is King) barbershop in Spanish Harlem has the spirit of a small storefront Pentecostal church. The otherwise plain and humble Pierluca Hair Salon in Brooklyn is elevated with the solemn finery common to a small Roman Catholic chapel, with numerous framed portraits of Catholic saints.
Unusual? Not in New York, where the distinction between sacred and profane is always blurred, often simply because of geographical necessity _ too many people share the same streets. The result: Different cultures, races, classes and religions are constantly bumping into each other, making distinctions difficult.
“Sacred and profane: It’s not either-or in New York,” Racioppo said in a recent interview. “It’s all overlapping.”
Racioppo calls himself a non-practicing Catholic _ “spiritual” is how he describes himself _ but credits the Italian-American Catholic culture of his youth for training his eye to the spiritual dimension and expression of the everyday. “I just have an affinity for it,” Racioppo said.
Pongracz affirmed those early influences: “Larry has been attuned to that (the spiritual of the everyday); it was part and parcel of his early life and he has been able to appropriate it in different contexts through his photography.”
“It’s not cynical and it’s not an ironic comment on diverse religious practices,” she said. “He’s very emotionally connected and sees it with an artist’s eye.”
One subject not part of the recent exhibit is memorials devoted to those who perished on Sept. 11, 2001. Racioppo said that subject felt like something too distinctive _ “something apart,” he said _ but said such memorials have become an increasingly important part of the city’s street life during the last five years.
Whatever their source, memorials are a significant part of being human, Racioppo said.
The New York street murals memorializing the dead of the poor or working class, he said, stem from the same impulse as a university scholarship or endowed chair to memorialize the dead of the rich and prominent.
“However simple,” he said, “memorials are very important to people.”
The exhibit “The Word on the Street” runs through Sunday (Aug. 20) at the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan. A catalog on Racioppo’s work by Patricia Pongracz is available from the museum, http://www.mobia.org.
KRE/PH END HERLINGER
Editors: To obtain photos from `The Word on the Street’ and of Racioppo, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
