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- 1. Corridor, Ellis Island 1998
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- 2. Hamlet’s Father, Halloween 1982
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- 3. Auto Wreckers and bayonne Bridge 1993
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- 4. Lobby, House of Prayer for All People 1999
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- 5. Demolition of the Thunderbolt 2000
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- 6. Quentzel Plumbing Company 2008.
Larry Racioppo 141 Beach 129th Street Rockaway, NY 11694
larryracioppo.com
Larry Racioppo
b. 1947
Home Page: larryracioppo.com
Archive Contact: larryracioppo@gmail.com
LARRY RACIOPPO was born and raised in South Brooklyn. After two years as a VISTA volunteer in California, he returned home in December, 1970, intending to become a photographer. While working a series of jobs—telephone repairman, taxi cab driver, waiter and bartender, and photographer’s assistant—he completed his undergraduate work at Fordham University and earned a master’s degree at Brooklyn College.
All the while, Racioppo was photographing his neighborhood, working in black-and-white 35mm and later in 120mm film. He had his first solo exhibition in 1977 at Brooklyn’s f-stop gallery, and in 1980 Scribner’s published his first book of photographs, Halloween.
In 1989 Racioppo became the official photographer for New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, hired to document the city’s re- building of its distressed neighborhoods, from Bedford Stuyvesant to Harlem to the South Bronx.
When he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 1997, Racioppo took a leave from HPD to create a series of panoramic urban landscapes. He returned to HPD to coordinate LANDSCAPES OF HOPE an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York documenting the agency’s work. While continuing to photograph for HPD until 2011, Racioppo had solo exhibits of two in-depth personal projects: FORGOTTEN GATEWAY: The Abandoned Buildings of Ellis Island at the National Building Museum, and THE WORD ON THE STREET at the Museum of Biblical Art.
Racioppo has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the Graham Foundation. In 2006 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Chairman’s Extraordinary Action Grant for his exhibit “The Word on the Street” at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. Racioppo’s work is in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library, El Museo del Barrio, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.