Some of the best street photographers are outsiders who stalk the city anonymously, blending into the concrete and crowds as they filter tender fleeting moments through their own emotional lens.
Angelo Antonio Rizzuto, an unlikely street photographer who went unnoticed as he captured more than 60,000 images of the postwar city, fits this description perfectly.
Rizzuto’s early days seem idyllic, but his was a turbulent life. Born in 1906 in South Dakota, this son of a Sicilian construction company owner grew up in Omaha, graduated college in Ohio, and made it to Harvard Law School in the early 1930s.
After his father’s death and a suicide attempt prompted by infighting over the family estate, Rizzuto’s life took a dark turn.
Mental illness set in. Instead of finishing his Harvard degree, he joined the army, and after a medical discharge drifted across the country doing odd jobs before settling in Manhattan.
Armed with a camera and a new identity as Anthony Angel, he spent years promptly leaving his rented room on East 51st Street to crisscross the city, an unlikely documentarian of ordinary glimpses during Gotham’s postwar years.
“On almost every afternoon from 1952 to 1966, [Rizzuto] left his crummy rented room to snap pictures on the New York streets,” wrote New York magazine in 2005.
“The rest of the day he spent shunning company, writing delusional anti-Semitic letters to politicians, and striving to patent an improved stepladder, with the single-mindedness of a recluse and the meticulous obsessiveness of a paranoid schizophrenic,” continued New York.
What caught his attention? The bigness of the city’s skyscrapers, parks, bridges, and fences. Attracted to these geometric forms, he sometimes shot sweeping views from high above.
Rizzuto was also drawn to sensitive moments of loneliness and alienation on the faces of average, unglamorous New Yorkers. Some mugged for the camera, but most were oblivious.
“If you look at enough of Angel’s work, you can see some recurring themes—cats and dogs, children, storefronts, people on the subway and in train stations, and nuns,” states a 2021 blog post from the Library of Congress, which has the Anthony Angel Collection in their holdings.
“He used architectural elements such as railings, lamp posts, and windows as compositional elements in his photos,” continued the Library of Congress post.
But what compelled him to obsessively take photos day after day, then develop them using equipment he stored in a brownstone purchased with the proceeds of his deceased brother’s estate?
He never actually lived in that brownstone, also on East 51st Street. Instead, he preferred his cramped and sparely furnished rented room.
Rizzuto (at right in a self-portrait) had a plan for his photos; he hoped to publish them in a book he titled “Little Old New York.” He never got the chance.
Dying of cancer in 1967, he bequeathed thousands of dollars and his entire photo collection to the Library of Congress, instructing them to use the money to produce his book.
The Library of Congress accepted the bequest and “dutifully published a booklet bound with staples, illustrated with perhaps 60 indifferently printed reproductions of the dead man’s pictures,” wrote photo historian Michael Lesy, author of Angel’s World, a 2006 book about Rizzuto that features dozens of his images.
“It then proceeded to spend his money,” continued Lesy.
Years ago, while doing research at the Library of Congress, Lesy came across hundreds of Rizzuto’s obsessively organized contact sheets stuffed in folders, unseen for decades.
This discovery led him to try to excavate the life of this troubled outsider, which he does skillfully and with sensitivity in his 2006 book.
“In a way, he could have been Leopold Bloom, scampering through squares of private meaning, or Prufrock, wandering through certain half-deserted streets, or Krapp, holding his endless spools of tape up to the light,” wrote Lesy.
“The pictures he made were acts of homage and appropriation, elements in an iconography of a city permeated by a self.”
[Photos: Anthony Angel Collection at the Library of Congress]
Ephemeral New York 