I was worried I wouldn’t have much to say about photographer
Angelo Rizzutoor
The King of Pizza, the
second of his photosin 20x200’s
Vintage Editionscollection. His photos that have emerged from their home in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, where he willed them upon his death in 1967, are at once well-composed and engaging in their own way — but, to a contemporary eye, familiar enough as a genre as to be almost unremarkable.
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Not this one, of course! How could it be?! It’s pizza-related, after all.
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As a longtime Internet pizza nerd (and even longer-time amateur photographer who has himself taken
thousands of pizza and pizzeria snapshots), I’d like to think most of us love the stuff and are drawn to photos of it.
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This one, with a bold band of blazing neon lettering running across the top of the photo — “The KING of PIZZA” — \xa0 and smaller neon signs in the window and deeper inside the shop, could, if formatted differently, serve as a record album or book cover. It’s that graphically compelling.
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Notice also, that the New Yorkers standing in front of the shop on a July evening in 1957 are not necessarily in line (aka “
on line” in New York parlance) but appear to be watching the pizzaman in the window do his thing. Pizza itself — let alone pizza by the slice — was still a bit of a novelty at this point in
the NYC pizza timeline, and slice shops often put pie men in the window as a bit of pizza theater. You could also imagine the storefront as a proscenium arch and the white-clad chef on a brightly lit and well-designed stage.
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And it’s just one slice of the pizza pie that is Rizzuto’s extra-large body of work as a sort of outsider-art photographer whose significance was exposed only after his death. (Not unlike
Vivian Maier, to be sure.)
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Born in 1906 in South Dakota and raised in Nebraska, he moved to New York City in the early 1950s, where he began obsessively documenting Manhattan with the unrealized goal of publishing a book to be titled, "Little Old New York, Three Centuries After, by Anthony Angel." Three centuries after the English took control of Manhattan (in 1664), that is, with “Anthony Angel” his preferred Anglicized transposition of his given name, Angelo Antonio Rizutto.
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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, intimately revealing self-portraits a half-century before social media would make the “selfie” a thing. Not to mention a healthy number of cat photos.
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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.
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Before I leave you to purchase your print, I will point that that, per the 2006 Michael Lesy bookAngel’s World, Rizzuto was a recluse with deep-seated family trauma drawn to baseless notions about Communists, Jews, and “perverts in the government” conspiring against him — all still disappointingly relevant today — which seemed to flare up at its worst while feuding with his brothers over various inheritances. Lesy, who uncovered Rizutto’s biography after happening upon his voluminous bequeathal to the LOC on a research assignment there, points out the inherent contradiction in Rizutto’s delusions and the nature of the very city he chose to memorialize in 60,000-some photos (most of which remain unprinted). I bring all this up because ignoring his troubled life seems somehow wrong.\xa0
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For more on Rizutto and his place in photo history, I’d recommend these two
blogpostson loc.gov and Lesy’s aforementioned book.
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With art for everyone,
Adam Kuban
