I’m 72 years old now and no longer remember exactly when I stopped being a “practicing Catholic.” As Ernest Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt, it happened gradually, then suddenly.

While at Fordham from 1965 to 1968, I learned about other religions and spiritual practices, other traditions and virgin births. My worldview simply expanded and eventually my parents’ and grandparents’ faith was no longer mine.

Or so I thought. In 1971 I began photographing, first in Brooklyn, then throughout New York City. As I published and exhibited my work in the following decades, I became increasingly aware that many of my extended projects focused on some aspect of religion. Hidden or neglected, my Catholic roots had influenced my choice of subjects.

In 2005, the Museum of Biblical Art presented 80 of my photographs in The Word on the Street. The photographs in this exhibit captured various forms of religious expression in everyday New York City life: from memorial walls with paintings of Sacred Hearts to crucifix tattoos and home altars.

When asked in a 2002 PBS interview about the distinctive essence of being an American Catholic, the priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew Greeley emphasized the power of traditional Catholic imagery. “They like the stories. Christmas, Easter, May crowning, the souls in purgatory, the saints, the angels, the mother of Jesus. These are enormously powerful religious images.”

This insight has proven especially true for me because religion was intertwined with ethnicity and geography. The flickering candles and statues of saints on my grandmother’s dresser in her Brooklyn apartment fascinated me when I was a boy. I photographed it in 1975 and 30 years later made a print of it for The Word on the Street.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, I began sheltering at home in early March.  I’ve had even more time to think about how these themes have affected my work. I’ve been looking at contact sheets from the 1980s and scanning negatives I never printed. I photographed the top half of an old calendar on the wall of my Park Slope apartment in 1983.

This image of a guardian angel and two children crossing a bridge is well known and frequently reproduced. It reminds me of the schoolbooks I had as a child. A drawing in one of them depicts my guardian angel with its hands on my shoulder as I cross the street.

The website catholic.org lists 39 prayers to guardian angels. I would say them all, every day, to get my guardian angel back.

—Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72, was the staff photographer for New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development for more than 20 years. He has earned several grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for his own work documenting the urban landscape. His most recent books are B-BALL NYC (South Brooklyn Boy Publishing, 2019) and Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 (Cornell University Press, 2018).

But while the New York City parks department maintains hundreds of public courts, there has long been an ecosystem of alternative hoops in the city. These hoops—ones that reflect the history of inequity in New York, almost always lacking nets, sometimes constructed from a mix of found materials—are the focus of a new book of photography, B-BALL NYC, by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72. Selected photos from the book are also on display at the Brooklyn Arts Council in Dumbo until December 19, with viewings by appointment.

While working as a staff photographer for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Racioppo, a Sunset Park native who has previously released books of Halloween photos and Brooklyn street scenes from the 1970s and 1980s, was tasked with taking pictures of vacant land and distressed properties. It was in these areas that he began to notice a common sight: makeshift basketball hoops, attached to the sides of buildings, steel fences, trees—wherever folks could get a backboard and rim (of some sort) to stay up.

Whether born out of a lack of proximity to a playground or the need for kids to create a safe playing space as close to home as possible, these hoops represent the resourcefulness of New Yorkers who have always found a way to bring “the city game” to wherever they are.

“[It’s] a game you can play with a minimum amount of equipment,” Racioppo recently told WFUV’s George Bodarky. “All you need is a basketball and a few friends. And if you [can’t] find anyone to play with, you [can]just practice your shots.”

Along with Racioppo’s photos, taken between 1971 and 2018, B-BALL NYC features New York Times writer Dan Barry’s 2012 essay, “Hoops Spring Eternal,” and an original poem, “For Those Who Know … the Playground,” by legendary DJ, filmmaker, writer, and basketball aficionado Bobbito Garcia.

While several of the photos depict official playgrounds, the majority of them tell a story of the unconventional spaces that have served the needs of resource-strapped hoops heads over five-plus decades in New York City.

More information about B-BALL NYC can be found on Racioppo’s website.

“Here it hangs, another basketball hoop built into the brick of the city. Probably without a net. Maybe bent a little at the front of the rim. Maybe nothing more than a milk crate hammered into a plywood backboard. But it speaks to you.”

–Dan Barry, from “Hoops Spring Eternal”

“For those who didn’t have rims, who have shot on the bottom step of a fire-escape ladder or bottomless milk crate, or empty trash can … For those who know the Playground, that playground is you.”

–Bobbito Garcia, from “For Those Who Know … the Playground”

America, as Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe

In her latest book, Clara Rodríguez examines the “soft power” of American television in projecting U.S.-centric views around the globe. She analyzes the strong influence TV exercises on both young Americans and recent immigrants with regard to consumer behavior and their views on race, class, ethnicity, and gender.

The book is based on two studies: one focused on 71 immigrant adults over 18 who had watched U.S. TV in their home country, and one focused on 171 U.S.-born undergraduates from the Northeast. Many in the foreign-born group were surprised to find that their experience of the U.S. proved more racially and economically diverse than the mostly white, middle-class depictions of American life that they had seen back home on TV. And substantial majorities of both groups shared the sense that American TV is flawed in that it “does not accurately represent or reflect racial and ethnic relations in the United States.”

Still, Rodríguez notes, TV is “a medium in flux; it has changed greatly in the past decade, and the only thing we can be certain about is that it will continue to change.”

Back from the Brink: Saving Animals from Extinction by Nancy F. Castaldo, MC ’84 (Cornell University Press)

In Back from the Brink, Nancy Castaldo recounts the survival stories of seven species—whooping cranes, alligators, giant tortoises, bald eagles, gray wolves, condors, and bison.

“All of these animal populations plummeted,” she writes, “and yet, all of them survive today.”

She describes how each species got in trouble; relates the often controversial restoration efforts and their results; explains the need for apex predators; offers calls to action for young readers; and pays tribute to a group of “eco-heroes” (including President Richard Nixon, who in 1973 signed the Endangered Species Act) who “look out for the needs of creatures that cohabit this planet, even when these needs may conflict with our short-term economic goals.”

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family by Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and American studies at Fordham (Harvard University Press)

From failed promises of women “having it all” to the contemporary struggle for equal wages for equal work, Kirsten Swinth exposes how government policies often undermined tenets of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s.

She argues that second-wave feminists did not fail to deliver on their promises; rather, a conformist society pushed back against far-reaching changes sought by these activists.

“My focus is on the story of a broad feminist vision that wasn’t fully realized,” Swinth notes. “There were a lot of gains generally, but the movement also generated an antifeminist backlash so that most of the aspirations, like a sane and sustainable balance for work and family, were defeated.”

She examines activists’ campaigns and draws from them “a set of lessons that we need to inspire us” to continue the fight “with a new energy.”

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham (Hill and Wang)

To better understand the history of the United States, one should include the people who were displaced from lands they once called home, argues Steven Stoll. That story includes not only Native American tribes evicted by English and later American settlers but also poor whites who once called the mountains of Appalachia home.

In Ramp Hollow, he visits an area just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia, to explore how the people who once lived there were pushed out and forced to surrender a self-sustaining, agrarian life in exchange for a wage-based living tied to coal mining companies and lumber mills.

Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 by Larry Racioppo, FCRH ’72 (Cornell University Press)

New York City photographer Larry Racioppo honed his art and craft during the 1970s by taking pictures of family, friends, and kids in his working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood.

This collection of his early work highlights families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes.

“I did it because I liked the feel of it,” he says. “There was something about having a camera that made me think, made me feel more alert and more aware of my environment.”

Few days made Racioppo feel more alert than Halloween.

As a kid, he’d go trick-or-treating with cousins and friends, and they’d have make-believe fights with shaving cream and “chalk bags”—old socks filled with pieces of chalk crushed to dust. By nightfall, they’d head indoors to bob for apples, carve jack-o’-lanterns, and enjoy the sweet loot they’d foraged from friendly neighbors. “I loved the activity, the crazy costumes, the theatricality of it,” he says.

By the mid-’70s, he was in his 20s, a recent Fordham graduate working at a high-end Manhattan photo studio. He’d long since stopped trick-or-treating, but the spirit of the holiday still called to him.

“I started leaving work early on Halloween to get back to Brooklyn. I photographed kids from 3 o’clock, when they got out of school, until it got too dark to shoot with available light,” he says, noting that he’d start near Park Slope and wander south to Sunset Park. “That first year, I came out of my house and the kids charged me—they ran up to me full speed for me to take their picture.”

“It became a yearly thing,” he says, “so from ’74 to ’78, I had all these fabulous photographs. And the kids and costumes were terrific. There’s the classics—the ghosts, vampires, angels. And every year there’s a movie that’s the big movie. One year it’s Planet of the Apes, then it’s Jaws, then Star Wars, and sometimes those cultural costumes would linger a year or two. But they have a shelf life—I mean, when you look back and see the Fonz costumes. These days, who even knows who the Fonz was?”

Ever since 1974, Racioppo says he’s had an easy rapport with the neighborhood kids, who took to calling him “Picture Man,” a nickname he says he took as a great compliment.

In October 1979, the Village Voice featured eight of Racioppo’s Halloween images, and the following year, Scribner’s published Halloween, his first book.

“That was really my first notch up,” he says, noting that it helped launch his decades-long career in photography. From the late 1980s until 2011, he was a staff photographer for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, and he has earned several grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for his own work documenting the urban landscape.

“Part of what I do is about stuff disappearing,” he once told The New York Times. That’s an explicit theme of his latest book, Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983, published last month by Cornell University Press.

The book highlights working-class families—most of them Italian American, Irish American, and Puerto Rican—as they go about their daily lives, celebrating Catholic sacraments and holidays, playing stickball and congas on the sidewalk, hanging out on stoops and fire escapes, posing with boom boxes in front of graffiti-tagged walls, and taking part in patriotic parades and religious processions.

“I did not know it at the time, but I was recording a part of Brooklyn that would soon be remade by gentrification,” Racioppo writes in the book’s preface. “Slowly but surely, the residential ‘gold rush’ expanded south from Park Slope … toward Green-Wood Cemetery,” driving up rents and home prices, and driving out many working-class families.

Brooklyn Before features a handful of the Halloween photos that helped launch Racioppo’s career. Today, he lives in the Rockaways, where he has continued photographing trick-or-treaters on Halloween. This year, however, he says he may head back to Brooklyn to meet up with his grandsons in Park Slope, where, although the times have changed, the spirit of the holiday is still strong.

“They’re 8 and 6 years old now. They won’t just get a chalk bag and run around till dark by themselves. They’ll go to supervised play or an after-school Halloween celebration,” he says, like the annual children’s parade. “Halloween is always fun. There are so many great things about it.”