Artist’s Introduction
by Vincenzo Pietropaolo

This exhibition at the Italian-American Museum in New York is particularly significant for me, for it resonates well beyond the professional and artistic achievements it may represent, and takes me back to childhood memories and experiences about immigration.

In my book Not Paved With Gold, I stated that photography and immigration have been inextricably linked in my life. Growing up in rural Calabria, southern Italy, and the concept of “final departure” — the essence of emigration — had been firmly entrenched in my inner being. Letters from immigrants in distant places were arriving regularly in the village of Maierato, my birthplace. As the houses did not have street addresses with numbers, in order to deliver the mail the postman had to rely on his detailed knowledge of almost every family in the population of 3,000. There were no mailboxes or letter slots on doors, so upon reaching the intended house, the mailman acted like a town crier calling out the name of the recipient at the top of his lungs, for everyone to hear. The addressee, usually a woman, would open the door, or perhaps hurry down a flight of stairs, and, as she clutched the letter in her hands, the look of great anticipation on her face became etched in my mind, time and time again, and as permanently as the silver salts that form images on photo paper.

The arrival of a letter became nothing less than a public event. Neighbors would gather quickly, or would lean from their windows or stoops, to hear once more the name of that magical place that was the letter’s most likely point of origin: New York. Thus words that make up the name “New York” were the first words that I learned in the English language, although in actual fact they sounded more like “Nova Yorka” in my native Calabrian dialect. Letters also came from other cities, such as Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago, or from other countries such as Argentina or Australia, but it was the name “New York” that reverberated most deeply with everyone. As the port of entry for most Italian immigrants that went to the United States, the name New York was bandied about town as if by second nature, and could be heard every day in the piazza, at the public fountain, in the barber shop, and every other place where people gathered. Those who were fortunate enough to have relatives in New York (which in reality could have meant anywhere in the United States) suddenly enjoyed a higher status in the community, and were considered “Americans-in-the-making.” Surely, such a family connection would one day enable them to leave the misery of the impoverished town behind and partake of the American dream.

Myth and legend of New York and America permeated our very soul. “America” became the metaphor for the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, and the destination at the end of the long ocean voyage. In time, I learned that many of the families who had left post war Italy, had in fact gone to other countries. Nonetheless, in their minds and hearts it was always “America” that they set out for. The final destination sometimes seemed to be little more than a geographic detail.

Before my family’s time to emigrate came, I remember a large poster of the ship that we were to sail on, the Greek liner S.S. Queen Frederica, in New York harbor beckoned by a heavenly looking Statue of Liberty. The travel agent had given the poster to us, and it had been hanging on our kitchen wall for months. Everyday I stared at it, dreaming of the mysterious voyage and the new life that lay ahead for us in “America”.

It took the Queen Frederica eleven full days to sail from Naples across the Mediterranean Sea through the Strait of Gibraltar, across the Atlantic to the New World. In the euphoria of arrival no one seemed to notice that there was no Statue of Liberty welcoming our ship as there had been in the poster on our kitchen wall, for we had arrived not in New York, but in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We set foot on terra firma on April 5, 1959 at Pier 21, eastern Canada’s historic point of entry for generations of new Canadians. I remember little else of the arrival, except that after we disembarked, and our immigration papers were stamped, we took a long train journey to Toronto. It was finally clear: our “America” was going to be Canada, and the fabled skyline of New York would remain an imaginary fixture.

But as I started to learn about photography, New York once again became a presence in my mind, mostly through the photographs of Lewis Hine of the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the early 1900’s. Those images, and others such as Stieglitz’s Steerage, had a captivating effect on me, for they showed not the New York of myth and legend in which the immigrants wanted so much to believe, but the gritty reality of entering an unknown and harsh world with a mixture of trepidation, anxiety, and hope. Later I came across the following paragraph, which helped me to formulate a philosophical position in my photography, and shape my approach in photographing immigrants and workers: “It was an old superstition, sometimes half believed by the simplest emigrants, that the streets in New York were paved with gold. When they got here, they learned three things: first, that the streets were not paved with gold; second, that the streets were not paved at all; and third, that they were expected to pave them.” From Blood of My Blood, by Richard Gambino, as quoted in Not Paved With Gold, by Vincenzo Pietropaolo, 2006, p. 1.