From Publishers Weekly
A provocative and disturbing photographic document, Mel Rosenthal's In the South Bronx of America captures the willful destruction primarily by fire of the South Bronx during the years 1975 to 1983. In some photos, false fronts are pasted on the windows of burned-out buildings to camouflage the blight as the area was being readied for real-estate developers and business owners. Grace Paley, Martha Rosler and Barry Phillips join Bronx native Rosenthal in contributing probing and piercing essays.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
These publications are poignant visual reminders of shameful times in our nation's past and of the remarkable endurance of human beings. In 1975, after a 20-year absence from his birthplace, Rosenthal returned to the South Bronx to become director of the photography program at Empire State College, a branch of SUNY. He found buildings abandoned or burned down, garbage piled everywhere, disease and crime rampant all the result of "planned shrinkage," in which city services to an unsuspecting neighborhood are deliberately cut and the poor forced out to make way for industrial development and new highways. He photographed the rubble and the residents of this urban devastation, the majority being African Americans or Latinos. The approximately 80 black-and-white images of the South Bronx, taken between 1975 and 1983, show one of this country's most poverty-stricken areas, victimized by corporate greed.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
