Upon moving into a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1984, the 23-year-old photographer Tria Giovan spent her days observing her new neighborhood and its increasingly Puerto Rican and Chinese community for “fleeting moments, gestures, color and light.”
The resulting body of work, recently rediscovered and published in LOISAIDA (Damiani, $55), looks like stills from a documentary’s B-roll, the tones soft and dim, slants of sunlight bathing street corners in a sense of calm, and stasis.
But of course the world around her was anything but still: “So much has changed since the genesis of ‘Loisaida,’” she writes, as the ensuing decades’ rising costs of living displaced working-class residents from the area.
But in Giovan’s images of a Lower East Side “synonymous,” as the curator Sean Corcoran writes in the book, “with crime, rampant drug abuse, urban decay and homelessness,” we also witness the ways in which “life not only carried on; it thrived”: families gathering on fire escapes and around folding tables on the sidewalk, a woman standing in the Church of St. Mary next to a plaque that calls it the “oldest Catholic Church structure in New York,” community members playing baseball and wrestling and eating and window-shopping.
Beneath the layers of today’s gentrification, this book recalls the universality of a time and place: its “vibrancy, diversity, coexistence.”
Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.
