When 23-year-old photographer Toria Giován moved into a rowhouse on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1984, she spent her days observing her new neighborhood and growing Puerto Rican and Chinese communities. “A fleeting moment, a gesture, a color, a light”
The resulting body of work was recently rediscovered and published. LOISAIDA (Damiani, $55)looks like a B-roll still from a documentary, the colors are soft and dim, and the slanting light of the sun shining down on the street corners gives it a sense of stillness and stillness.
But of course, the world around her was anything but quiet. “A lot has changed since the birth of ‘Loisaida,'” she wrote, as the rising cost of living in the following decades forced working-class residents out of the area.
But as curator Sean Corcoran writes in the book, Jovan’s image of the Lower East Side has “synonyms” of “crime, rampant substance abuse, urban decline, and homelessness.” There is a language, and we are also witnessing that ‘more than just life goes on’. families gathering around folding tables on fire escapes and sidewalks, woman standing next to plaque reading “Oldest Catholic Church Building in New York” at St. Mary’s Church, locals playing baseball, wrestling and dining and window shopping.
Beneath today’s layers of gentrification, the book reminds us of the universality of time and place: ‘vibration, diversity and coexistence’.
Lauren Christensen is the editor of Book Review magazine.
