Alphabet City

by Geoffrey Biddle, Geoffrey Biddle (Photographer)

"My Moms was a good person. She cared, but she just couldn't hack us no more. She kept saying she gonna kill herself, too. The day she died, she told me that my father hit her, and I told her, That was good for you, for not cooking for him. And she left. I didn't know she took the pills, though. The next day, they told me she was dead."―Pistol

This searing portrait of inner-city life takes us inside one of America's deadly urban battlefronts―the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Alphabet City on New York's Lower East Side. With unnerving clarity, Geoffrey Biddle shows us the people who live there, summoning their spirit against the brutalizing conditions of poverty, joblessness, drugs, crime, and violence. Capturing life in this ghetto on film and in words with rawness and compassion, he shows the human toll of impoverishment and neglect.

In 1977 Geoffrey Biddle photographed the residents of Alphabet City for the first time. Ten years later, he returned to this same area and photographed many of the same people again, this time also interviewing them. Alphabet City is the result of those encounters.

While the stories are unique, they coalesce into a single tale all the more jarring for the matter-of-fact tone in which it is told. There is Ariel, whose dreams of becoming a boxer were destroyed when he contracted AIDS. And Linda, raising three sons while sleeping in the street, hungry and drug-addicted. There are also tales of human resilience like Richard's, a defiant former gang member who now attends college. These stories belong not only to one New York neighborhood, but to urban ghettos across the United States.

Framed by Miguel Algarín's compelling introduction and dramatized by the speakers' own testimony, Geoffrey Biddle's photographs are haunting portrayals of a ravaged community battling ineffectually against deprivation and betrayal. This book forces us to see faces and to hear voices that won't be easy to forget, and yet which in the end are not so different from our own.

Genres: Art

1 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 1992

Reviews

[Tiffani Berthold · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredibly insightful book that shed light on what it was like to live in the Lower East Side. The photography alone captured faces and scenes that seemed to ring out with a hunger for change and a ringing sadness and anger that comes from cyclical poverty and broken homes. I feel like I came to understand a part of the world I know nothing about and have never been to. If every city could be captured as Biddle has with Alphabet City, our empathy for other human beings could be developed beyond what exists now. This book is a beautiful example of what photojournalism could, and should be.

[Marissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoffrey Biddle is an absolute genius of photographic composition in a way that reminds me very much of Doisneau's uncanny eye for street scenes. I love this kind of black-and-white, documentarian portraiture that manages to bring out so much of the humanity of it's subjects. Check out the whole book online at the photographer's website: http://geoffreybiddle.com/projects/al...