A portrait of Pilsen - Chicago, Illinois

“For many viewers, the challenge of Barrio: Photographs from Chicago’s Pilsen and Little Village, Paul D’Amato’s beautiful and troubling warts-and-all portrait of the city’s largest Mexican-American neighborhoods, will be to resist the temptation to see it solely as a sociological document of an immigrant population.

Like his forebears Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, D’Amato may seem primarily interested in scoring political points about poverty, inequality and urban dysfunction. A professor at Columbia College Chicago, D’Amato found himself drawn to the city’s Latino strongholds more than 15 years ago, beginning in 1988. Certainly few of the images here are likely to make their way into tourist brochures; Pilsen, the book’s ground zero, is shown as a gritty landscape of littered streets, dilapidated buildings, gang violence and spray-paint artists.”

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