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Arlene Gottfried, Bacalaitos and Fireworks

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Baclaitos and Fireworks is a documentary work by  New York photographer Arlene Gottfried about the Puerto Rican community in New York. A community  she has frequented regularly for forty years, from her beginnings as a photographer and which has become in some ways, over time, a second family. This color work has the same qualities of observation as her series Sometimes Overwhelming with this distanced view, full of empathy and tinged with humour.

From my window on the Lower East Side in New York, I watch the Puerto Rican culture that I had discovered thirty years before, at the time when I was beginning photography. One evening, I heard the shout of a street vendor, “Bacalaitos and fireworks!”: the bacalaitos , salted cod fritters in the Puerto Rican style, and the fireworks for the Fourth of July weekend. This juxtaposition remains engraved in my mind, a symbol of this immigrant population living in the streets of New York. Puerto Rican immigration to the United States began in the 1950s, the people came looking for a better standard of living. The families that came settled in several districts in the city, one of which was the district of Brooklyn where I grew up. I hung about the streets with my mates and my neighbors, it’s where I learnt to dance the salsa and speak a little Spanish, and when I started taking photos, my neighbourhood friends were the subjects.

Over the years, I did things more and more with the Latino population, and it is always something important in my life. The pictures displayed here show the negative effects of poverty, the suffering and the marginalization, the lack of care, the unwanted pregnancies, the child-mothers, the drugs, the criminality, prison and the extremely elevated rate of mortality among young people in the Puerto Rican community in New York. But these pictures also show the spirit of a people bursting with life. At the heart of the ghetto, to get through it, people can count on this lively, close-knit community to overcome the obstacles and trials of daily life.

Arlene Gottfried

Arlene Gottfried is an American photographer who lives and works in New York, United States.

 

Arlene Gottfried, Bacalaitos and Fireworks
From 20th January to 25th February 2017
Les Douches la Galerie
5, rue Legouvé
75010 Paris
France
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com

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