CBH Talk | Larry Racioppo’s Photographs of Loss and Remembrance in NYC
We all die. Rich and poor, famous and unknown, we all meet the same fate. Almost everyone is mourned, but the method can vary greatly.
Larry Racioppo, "Here Down On Dark Earth"
In Here Down On Dark Earth, photographer Larry Racioppo offers a powerful and moving meditation on the many ways New Yorkers remember those we’ve lost. From graffitied walls and formal memorials to a simple sign on a highway underpass bearing the word “DAD,” Racioppo’s photographs document these tributes with quiet poignancy and profound respect.
“I have photographed many types of monuments and memorials—large and small, civic and personal—throughout the city,” Racioppo writes. “Some commemorate a major event such as the attack on the World Trade Center, others the death of a single child hit by a stray bullet.”
Join Larry Racioppo for a conversation about this deeply personal body of work, which brings together two of his lifelong fascinations: cemeteries and memorial walls. He’ll be joined by the two Here Down On Dark Earth essayists: writer Clifford Thompson and Chief Curator and Executive Vice President of Collections at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Jan Seidler Ramirez. The discussion will be moderated by author and contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, Kevin Baker.
Above images courtesy of Larry Racioppo
Participants
Larry Racioppo was born and raised in South Brooklyn, and he has been photographing throughout New York City since 1971. A former VISTA Volunteer, and participant in the CETA Artists Project of New York City’s Cultural Council Foundation, Racioppo had his first solo exhibit in 1977 at Brooklyn’s f-stop Gallery, and in 1981 Scribner’s published his first book of photographs, Halloween.
Hired in 1989 as the official photographer for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Racioppo spent the next 22 years documenting the city’s rebuilding of distressed neighborhoods.
A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997 enabled a yearlong leave of absence to develop personal projects, including a series of images that became Forgotten Gateway: The Abandoned Buildings of Ellis Island, a traveling exhibition that opened at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
Racioppo’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the New York Public Library; the Brooklyn Public Library; El Museo del Barrio, New York; and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York. Recent monographs include Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Coney Island Baby (South Brooklyn Boy, 2021), and I Hope I Break Even, I Could Use The Money (Blurring Books, 2024). Fordham University Press will release Here Down On Dark Earth: Loss and Remembrance in New York City in April, 2025.
Jan Seidler Ramirez (Ph.D., American Studies, Boston University) is the founding Chief Curator and Executive Vice President of Collections at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. Under her guidance, the Memorial Museum’s collection has grown to include many thousands of objects, artworks, photographs, films, oral histories and audio artifacts, architectural relics, digital material, and other primary evidence connected to 9/11.
Prior to her 2006 appointment, she served as Vice President and Museum Director at the New-York Historical Society. Previously, she was Chief Curator and Deputy Director at the Museum of the City of New York, assuming that post after serving as Curator at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. Before relocating to New York, she was on staff at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts as Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts & Sculpture. Dr. Ramirez has written, lectured, curated exhibitions, and taught widely on subjects related to New York history, 19th and early 20th-century American art and material culture, rapid-response collecting, and preserving and interpreting the cultural heritage of societal trauma. She currently serves on the Collections Advisory Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Board of the New Amsterdam History Center.
Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (2019), which Time magazine called one of the “most anticipated” books of the season, and the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men (2022), which he wrote and illustrated. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Best American Essays, The Times Literary Supplement, Commonweal, and The Threepenny Review, among other places, and his essay “La Bohème” was selected for the 2024 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Thompson’s book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2025. Additionally, his novels Miles from Home and Let Us Go Then, You and I are forthcoming from Running Wild Press. A painter, he is a member of Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. He was born and raised in Washington, DC and attended Oberlin College.
Kevin Baker began his professional writing career at the age of 13, covering local schoolboy sports for the Gloucester Daily Times, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His mother taught him how to type, so he could keep the job. Baker is the author, most recently, of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2024, and Sports Illustrated’s book of the year. He has written six novels, including the New York Times bestseller, Paradise Alley, and is the author or co-author of five previous histories, as well as co-author of a memoir by Reggie Jackson.
Other work has included serving as a writer and researcher on the Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and as a historical consultant for the series, The Continental and The Alienist. He has appeared in many television productions about history and current affairs, including The Colbert Show, and When Truth Isn’t Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story. A contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, Baker has written for major periodicals throughout the United States and Europe.
He is currently at work on a political and cultural history of the United States between the world wars, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Baker lives in New York City with his wife, the playwright Ellen Abrams, and their cat, Natasha. The sequel to The New York Game, which will take the story of New York City and the game it invented through to the present day, is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2026.
Photo courtesy of Nina Subine
