In her latest book Loisaida New York Street Work 1984–1990, Tria Giovan presents an evocative chronicle of New York’s Lower East Side’s halcyon days.
In 1984, Tria Giovan moved to a tenement building on Clinton Street on New York City’s Lower East Side. She wandered the streets photographing as if in a foreign land. Loisaida— as it is known to some—was as gritty, authentic and humble as it was exotic, vibrant and colourful. The melding cultures and humanity she encountered inspired these photographs. Giovan left the neighbourhood and the work behind in 1990 without ever editing or producing the majority of the photographs. The negatives languished until the pandemic.
Tria Giovan: Loisaida New York Street Work 1984–1990, published by Damiani, is a time capsule; a cultural and historical record of a 1980s Lower East Side that fostered robust communities of diverse populations, including the many immigrants who took pride in making Loisaida their home. Her images invite curiosity and evoke nostalgia about a place in a bygone era that has been forever altered through waves of gentrification. Part preservation, part humanistic engagement, this project contributes to an historical visual legacy of the ever-evolving, always evocative Lower East Side.
“Through Giovan’s beautifully muted color photographs we are given a window into the resiliency of a neighborhood – the life of its community and the evolution of its built environment.” —Sean Corcoran
The photography of Tria Giovan (born 1961, raised in the Caribbean) has been defined by in-depth, timely, and thoughtful subject exploration that intertwines the personal and the observational. A documentarian with archival intentions, she is the author of Cuba: The Elusive Island (1996), Sand Sea Sky: The Beaches of Sagaponack (2012) and The Cuba Archive (2017). Exhibited in the US and internationally, her photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, the Parrish Art Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library. Her work has appeared in Aperture, Architectural Digest, Geo, Harpers, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, Vogue, The Washington Post, and in many other publications.
Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photographs, Museum of the City of New York, contributes an essay.
Published by DAMIANI
£45.00 Euro 50.00
