I’m a cultural cocktail of sorts. Only in New York City could a Puerto Rican woman meet, marry, and divorce a Haitian/Italian man that immigrated from Cuba and rear a kid who had to be kept on a leash--literally. The end result is a multilingual “loco” who’s passion is, and has been, photography for over twenty-five years.
I’ve worked as a staff photographer for a newspaper in Allentown, PA, “Celebrity News” for Getty Images, and for organiziations like AFSME, DC37 one of New York City’s largest municipal labor unions. But I’ve always been working on my personal photojournalism project titled “Legal Aliens: Gangsters, Musicians, the Neighborhood.” The body of work is split between two neighborhoods The Lower East Side (Ludlow Street) and East Harlem and spans four generations.
Over the years snippets of the work have been exhibited. The biggest accolade came from a group show curated by Nan Goldin in 1989 titled “Witness Against Our Vanishing.” I got a mention in the NY Times. Does that mean I get a NYT obituary?
The images in portfolio one and two are a fraction of the the body of work. Mainly because it’s an on going life project that will end when I cease to exist.