The Magazine for Leica M Photography

Spanish Harlem

12/10/2017, The Bronx Documentary Center is presenting Spanish Harlem: El Barrio in the '80s with photographs by Joseph Rodriguez. The exhibition will be on display there up until December 23, 2017. The collection is made up of pictures that the Leica photographer took at the beginning and middle of the eighties, in the New York district of East Harlem.

The US American (born 1951) lived himself in El Barrio – as the district is called – for five years. His pictures capture the mostly Puerto Rican residents who defy the poverty and – ultimately also – the threat of expulsion by gentrification, with determined self-confidence and resistant extravagance. “People are important to me,” the photographer comments, explaining his approach. “My type of photography isn’t hip, but it is relevant.”

In LFI 3/2015 LFI published a reportage by Joseph Rodriguez taken in Rumania shortly after the end of the Ceaușescu era dictatorship.

Further information at: Bronx Documentary Center and Joseph Rodriguez