As Susan Sontag noted, “all photographs are memento mori.” A number of the people seen in these images are now gone, and their artistic practices are no longer. The blocks of ice once transported on shoulders have long melted, and the wash drying on a backyard clothesline seem a nostalgic reminder of the fading “old neighborhood.” The Brooklyn depicted in these images has been dramatically altered, for better or worse. Martha Cooper’s Italian Brooklyn photographs are documents of a specific time and place, a chapter in the ongoing story of the borough’s Italian Americans.
—JOSEPH SCIORRA
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