Over on the 20×200 blog this week I wrote an introduction for the affordable-artwork website’s latest Vintage Editions release, Angelo Rizutto’s, “The King of Pizza.”
As I mention there, I was worried at first that I wouldn’t have much to say about it, but I was honored to have been asked, and by no less than Jen Bekman, a pioneer in the DIY/early 2000s internet-meets-IRL culture and also someone whose 20×200 website was ahead of its time as a DTC e-commerce platform.* Jen and her namesake Jen Bekman Gallery played an early role in the early 2000s NYC (photo) blogging scene, and she was a friend to many of us early New York bloggers back when the web seemed like a net good for society.
I also saw this as an intersection of my two nearly lifelong hobbies: photography and pizza.
I first entered a darkroom in 10th grade, and by my senior year of high school, I was clocking 3 hours of photography classes in my school day — Advanced Photo; Photojournalism; and Directed Study/Photo Aide, where I got to print my photos in exchange for 10 minutes of setting up the chemical baths for one of the Beginning Photo classes.
Over the years, I’ve taken thousands of pizza and pizzeria photos, continuing to this day, as I intermittently branch out to pizza video.
What I didn’t expect was that Rizzuto’s work would resonate more deeply with me than I’d anticipated.
His work, though, not his beliefs. Let’s get this out of the way: the guy was a delusional antisemitic crank who believed that communists, Jews, and “perverts in the government” were out to get him. I didn’t know this until diving into the research, and in light of it, I was conflicted about promoting him. But I figured I’d give the reader/buyer this info and let them make the choice. Which is perhaps a self-serving rationalization — because after I’d read about this guy in Michael Lesy’s biography/photo curation, Angel’s World, I was fascinated with his trajectory and body of work.
As I say in my intro:
From May 1952 to July 1966 he took thousands of photos of the city, concentrating on a handful of themes: formal architecture from street level and high above, fellow residents in all manner of situations and emotional states, intimate self-portraits a half-century before social media would make the “selfie” a thing. Not to mention a healthy number of cat photos.
In a way, it’s like he presaged the photoblog, Flickr, and Instagram content of the 2000–2010s — where the documentation itself was as much a point as any single composition. Which brings me back to the fact that, while this one photo is compelling in itself, to not explore the rest of Rizzuto’s work is to miss his significance in photo history.
I’ve worked for NYC Tourism on the social media team for yearrrrs now, and in that time I’ve spent thousands of hours on Instagram looking for UGC photos of NYC (“user generated content”) to regram — often geo-locating them against Google Street View when the original posters have omitted the location.
SO MUCH of what Rizzuto shot from 1952 to 1964 would fit right in on New York Instagram — a mixture of street photography and architectural studies with a good amount of selfies thrown in. He even went so far as to hire small planes and helicopters to capture aerial photos of the city, something many of the more architecturally driven accounts do today.
Part of the reason I thought I wouldn’t have much to say about Rizutto is that his photos, though competently composed and exposed, are not all that remarkable. (The examples here are some of his strongest, which doesn’t quite help my argument, I guess — but overall his photos veer more toward the “snapshot” end of the spectrum.) Although that might be difficult for me to tell at this point — having viewed so, so many NYC photos on Instagram at work, I’m a bit jaded.
But like I said above, it’s his overall obsessive body of work that’s impressive. His goal was to publish a book called “Little Old New York,” inspired by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes’s 1915–1928 Iconography of Manhattan Island, a six-volume history of the borough from 1498 to 1909. He tended to return to a handful of themes and visit many of the same places over the months and years — all of which I relate to as someone who:
- Has watched how some of the most-Instagrammed places in NYC have changed over the years, trending, then falling out of favor, then trending again, and also…
- Has participated in such documentation himself — most notably the aforementioned pizzerias but also hot dog carts, bicycles, window signs, holiday displays
In his book, Lesy seems to indicate that Rizutto was self-taught and there was no indication he was aware of the larger history of photography as an art. And while he certainly fits the mold of “outsider artist” (his work and posthumous discovery calls to mind Chicago’s Vivian Maier) I’d find it hard to believe that this college-educated, Harvard Law School dropout whose inspiration was an exhaustive compendium of Manhattan history did not do any reading about his photographic forbears or photographers working during that era, like Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank — all of whom he had elements in common with.
Anyway. If you’re interested in this guy — despite his unsavory aspects — I’d suggest first reading these two blog posts on the Library of Congress website, and then reading Lesy’s book, which you can borrow online for free from the Internet Archive (requires a free Internet Archive account).
*Although describing it as such makes it sound way more corporate and soulless than it is. It remains full of heart and a welcome throwback to that era