Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s Toronto of the 1970’s
by Maria Cocchiarelli



The experience of viewing Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s photographs from the series Not Paved with Gold will transform the viewers’ understanding of the Italian Canadian community in Toronto, as it existed during the 1970’s. The images on view at the Italian American Museum represent a portion of the 86 in the photo essay contained within Pietropaolo’s recent publication of the same name. Photographing ordinary moments in his communities’ workday, Pietropaolo reveals the extraordinary in his subjects’ struggles, triumphs and continued relationship to their homeland—Italy. The sampling of twenty-nine images on view in this exhibition parallels the themes running throughout this significant body of work. Images of labor, rituals, family life, and childhood composed with a formal aesthetic and sensibility to his subject matter comprise the collection. From the compositional strength of these photographs one would not know that a young Pietropaolo created this body of work at the beginning of his career in his early 20’s and late teens.



Since the 1970’s, Pietropaolo has produced over 6 books and photo essays that reflect his range and maturity as a social documentary photographer. As a record of the 1970’s in Toronto’s Italian Canadian community Pietropaolo’s work remains unique. This community has evolved since this time, many have moved out of the old neighborhood as their status changed while Pietropaolo’s work remains as a record of the period and a reminder of what has passed.



Jill Delaney, photography archivist, Library and Archives Canada has noted that Pietropaolo’s photography can be situated within a humanist documentary movement which took place in Canada from the late 1950s to the 1980s. Many of these works are included in the archive’s collection of 25 million photographs, dating from the 1840s until the present, as well as in the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, both housed in the nation’s capital, Ottawa. One hundred and thirty one prints by Pietropaolo from various portfolios strengthen the mandate of this Federal Agency to “collect photographs that document Canadian history and society—its social, political, economic and cultural life. With major communities in both Montreal and Toronto, Italian-Canadians form one of the country’s largest ethnic groups. Three of Pietropaolo’s collections within LAC focus on Toronto’s Italian community from 1971 to 1982, and help to document its vital role in the development and life of that city and of the nation as a whole. The photographs document both the every day life and work of the community, as well as Good Friday traditions.” ¹



In 1959, Pietropaolo immigrated to Canada from Maierato, Calabria in southern Italy. A boy of eight, Pietropaolo experienced for the first time, a sea voyage, leaving his town, friends, and old life behind. This experience becomes pivotal in determining his identity as an artist. An indelible image in Pietropaolo’s mind, influencing his aesthetic as well as his search for meaningful content is Alfred Stieglitz’s Steerage, from 1907. Stieglitz’s work in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art,² records an earlier wave of immigration at the turn of the century, and has evolved over the last hundred years from a strict document to a loaded iconic artwork. Stieglitz who is mostly remembered as the dissident founder of the Photo-Secession group furthered his interests to advance photography as an accepted art form equal to painting and sculpture throughout his career. Usually photographing subjects from a formally aesthetic viewpoint, of established writers and artists such as Georgia O’Keefe, his wife, it was the unidentified parties in the Steerage that evoked such emotion within the photographer at the end of his life by stating, “If all my photographs were lost and I’d be represented by just one, the Steerage, I’d be satisfied.” ³

Interestingly in Not Paved With Gold, Giuliana Colalillo notes in her essay L’altra Italia in Toronto that Italians arriving in Canada in the 1950’s and 60’s comprised “the second and by far the largest wave of Italian immigration in Canada.”4 These become the subjects in Pietropaolo’s Toronto of the 1970’s where one sees the daily life of those immigrants who had established roots and a new identity after only a few decades. Many of their Italian customs, habits, and interests remain intact in a new land through habitual reenactments of certain rituals and activities. Pietropaolo is able to enter into this world by license of being one of them. The viewer is privy to a world normally not viewed, especially in the 1970’s in Toronto. These are the Italian-Canadian immigrants living their lives separately in communities distinct to themselves and taking part in labor and customs not associated with fashion or art photography.