Angel's World: The New York Photographs of Angelo Rizzuto

by Michael Lesy

The fascinating search for meaning in the life and work of a little-known photographer. In this profound and disturbing book, noted photo historian Michael Lesy is in search of a man who left a strange archive of sixty thousand images to the Library of Congress. We learn that he was Angelo Rizzuto, but he called himself "the little Angel." He lived in a single, run-down room in a crummy hotel. We learn that every day he left at 2:00 p.m. to photograph New York City obsessively, from above and on the streets. We see the cityscapes he took, compassionate photographs of children and confrontational pictures of angry women. We see his anguished self-portrait taken almost every day. These are the obvious discoveries. What is not obvious is why; what did it all mean? In his thoughtful and erudite essay Lesy has fashioned nothing less than a psychoanalytic dissection of a tortured soul in an account that is both deeply unsettling and satisfying at the same time. 90 duotone photographs

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, History

128 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 2005

About the author

Michael Lesy’s books include Angel’s World and Long Time Coming. In 2006 he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellowship recipients, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College; he lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something about New York City from the mid-20th century that is always so amazing to me. Even by the 1960s, Metropolis still had a flair, a hive of humanity to so many. Angel Rizzuto was one of those denizens, an angry man (he felt his brothers had betrayed him) who snapped photographs of buildings and their inhabitants every day. He left a trove of snapshots to the Library of Congress, which did jack-squat with them until Michael Lesy came along.

Lesy's intoduction to the photos is quite marvelous, delving into Angel's life and trying to understand why he did what he did. The scenes of city life with the women (all who seem to have believed in heavily made-up eyebrows and faces...rather like today) walking angrily along and children still absorbed in childhood...it all takes us back to the days when social media meant standing on a corner and actually talking with others. Gotham style, of course.

These aren't photographs of a master but of a nameless layman, who left us a view of Manhattan that is now frozen in time. Makes for an excellent coffee-table companion.

Book Season = Autumn (that's NYC's best look)

[Jerstyn Morehay · Rating 5 out of 5]

As compelling a visual mystery as Lesy earlier confronted with Black River Falls in the 1890s, and earlier had and later would explore in Louisville and Chicago of the 1920s, the obsessive photographic work during the '50s and '60s of an NYC hermit named Angelo Rizzuto, self-nicknamed "Angel", offers a similarly haunted look outward into personal despair. Again, Lesy isn't so much concerned with what's apparent about the surface of the photographic image as about what's less apparent behind it. As such, the strangely matching eyelines of the photographer himself, captured in daily ritualized self-portraits before venturing forth with his camera each day at precisely 2PM, becomes a larger visual diary organized around the women, children, beggars, and cityscapes comprising his tortured photographic world.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Lesy discovered the photographs of Angelo Rizzuto in a neglected archive. Rizzuto was a paranoid recluse whose photographs are reminiscent of Robert Frank or Diane Arbus. He was an amateur NY photographer who bequeathed his photographs along with $50,000, to the Library of Congress when he died in 1967. The text by Lesy includes far too much about himself. Rizzuto left behind 60,000 photographs but only a tiny fraction of them are in this book. The reproductions are lush and gorgeous.