In 1988 photographer Paul D’Amato was driving around Chicago with his camera when he decided to follow Halsted Street into Pilsen, the city’s largest Mexican neighborhood. Intrigued by the barrio and neighboring Little Village, he began to take photographs and would continue to do so off and on for the next fourteen years. D’Amato started with the public life of the neighborhood: women and children in the streets, open fire hydrants, and graffiti. But later—after he got to know the area’s Mexican residents better—he was allowed to take more intimate photos of people at work, families at weddings and parties, and even gang members. Barrio collects ninety of these striking color images along with D’Amato’s fascinating account of his time photographing Mexican Chicago and his acceptance—often grudging, after threatened violence—into the heart of the city’s Mexican community. Some of the photos here are beautifully composed and startling—visual narratives that are surreal and dreamlike, haunting and mythic. Others, like those D’Amato took while shadowing graffiti artists in the subway, are far more immediate and improvisational. With a foreword by author Stuart Dybek that places D’Amato’s work in the context of the Pilsen and Little Village that Dybek has elsewhere captured so memorably, this book offers a penetrating, evocative, and overall streetwise portrait of two iconic and enduring Hispanic neighborhoods.

Barrio: Photographs from Chicago's Pilsen and Little Village (Chicago Visions and Revisions)

Arts & Photography

Paul D'Amato

Individual Artists

University of Chicago Press

Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, Paul D'Amato's photographs made on Chicago's West Side provide a nuanced perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the U.S. Equally committed to his craft and to immersing himself in the community, D'Amato's collaborative approach to portraiture aspires to narrow the divide between his and his sitters' subjective experiences in order to create photographs that are at once genuine and aesthetically engaging. We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato brings together ten years of work and offers insight into the making of the photographs. By pairing variants of a portrait from a single sitting, D'Amato seeks to complicate the images' meaning by defying the authority of a single photograph as a comprehensive statement. Neither feel-good narratives nor stories of despair, D'Amato's photographs convey the complexities of representation and the ambiguities of life in a socially and economically marginalized community. Published by the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago.Includes essays by Gregory J. Harris (Assistant Curator, DePaul Art Museum) and Pastor Cleophus J. Lee (Original Providence Baptist Church, Chicago).  Hardcover, 10 x 8 in., 102-pages, 47 plates, 3 gatefolds.We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato has been funded by the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

We Shall: Photographs by Paul D'Amato

Cleophus J. Lee

Gregory J. Harris

Photography & Video

DePaul Art Museum

Outs

Kelli Connell

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Books by Paul D'Amato