The Immigrant Experience Revealed
by Irene Zerbini

Let’s pause for a moment before looking at Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s photographs. The fact that we are already inside this museum probably means that we have a university education, almost certainly have been to high school (like the 80% of people who benefit from cultural activities in Canada and the United States), and most likely we have never had to emigrate. Yes, we have probably traveled, or have chosen to live overseas. But moving or transferring to a new job is not the same as emigrating, which means having to leave everything— not because one wants to, or perhaps because one seeks adventure, but because there is no alternative to a better future.

Raising your family and living to the end of your days in the country of your birth may seem like a very natural process, but for millions of people, that is a privilege or a dream, even today. Maybe it didn’t happen to us, but it is the lot of the women who clean our apartment, look after our children, serve us coffee this morning, or the men who repair the plumbing in our condominium, or drives our taxi.

Perhaps it was our parents or grandparents who emigrated.

The history of immigration is the history of the millions of human beings that turn up in the official statistics only because of their economic role, or whose cultural and religious differences often cause unwanted shake-ups in the “natural order” of things that so many would like to preserve unchanged. As long as immigrants are courteous, silent, and grateful, they are actually tolerated with a measure of benevolence. Conscious of this reality, progressive groups in society sometimes fight for their basic human rights.

If we look at Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s photographs carefully, maybe we will have a point of access to that universe which exists around us, a universe of dreams, aspirations, hard work, but also of irony, laughter, traditions and rituals, that enrich our own individuality. Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s camera has extracted the history of a specific ethnic community, the Italians in Canada, drawing it from its past and placing it at the center of our field of view.

Change their place of origin, their way of dressing or their faces, their estrangement— the way they live together on the margins of society—is but the same destiny that is shared by millions of other people in many nations today. It is not mere chance that the course of his research took the artist to Mexico and Jamaica to document seasonal workers who come to Canada and the United States, or the fishermen, miners, and industrial workers across Canada, all of whom have an ethnic background different than his. Many tell stories, but few have the talent to extract a History with a camera from the ordinary reality in which they are immersed. The third eye of Vincenzo Pietropaolo, the camera that from a young age accompanied him wherever he went, has captured moments, which we would not have been otherwise privileged to see.

Who, but Vincenzo Pietropaolo would have transformed into an icon, a pair of worker’s pants that hang from a clothesline, over rows of tomatoes in the backyard (Clothesline, Euclid Avenue, 1976). Or an elderly couple overcome by sleep as they sit on the sofa (Watching television, 1972)? Or a Italian worker who in his spare time dedicates himself to reconstructing his own piece of Italy, by building a pergola with discarded or found materials, the same kind of pergola which well-to do tourists seek out in Tuscany, in their quest for the quintessential pleasure of life? Commenting on Harvesting backyard grapes, North York, 1978, Pietropaolo explains:

“Long before the concept of recycling or of found materials had become fashionable, either in language or in practice, immigrant households had found unique uses for the discarded pipes: they became building materials for the pergola, or grape arbour, which quickly became an identifying feature of virtually every Italian–Canadian backyard of the period. In the backyards of houses on streets with names like Euclid, Grace and Beatrice, pairs of worker’s pants were ubiquitous on the clotheslines. Well worn and patched, heavy with water, the pants hung low, dripping on the staked tomato plants that were parts of the same story.”

Like the photographer, thousands of people, children of immigrants and non-immigrants alike, were present at a procession in the heart of Little Italy, or may have been leisurely walking on a sidewalk, brushing against construction workers without even being aware of them.