How Photographer Angela Cappetta’s New Book Captures The Beauty Of Puerto Rican Girlhood In NYC
“I came up at a time when images of Latinos were few and far between. I rarely saw someone who looked like me, my parents or my cousins anywhere,” says Puerto Rican writer Luna Lauren Vélez in the essay which accompanies Glendalis: The Life And World Of A Youngest Daughter, a curious new photobook from New York-based photographer Angela Cappetta. “If I did see us represented, it was usually in a film where the Puerto Ricans were sporting a ’70s Afro, and doing something likely on the wrong side of the law. Their lives didn’t seem to really matter.”
Shot over roughly a decade in a pre-gentrification Lower East Side, Glendalis captures the heart and soul of a Puerto Rican family, with a particular focus on the family’s youngest daughter – the book’s namesake, Glendalis – as she grows into a young woman. Glendalis is a showcase of a girl whose life appears imbued with the love and support of her community – a life that truly matters.
Starting around 1994, Cappetta, who remains as resident of the Lower East Side to this day, began by simply going out in the mornings with her camera to photograph her surroundings (“that’s when that neighbourhood was the safest,” she says). She shot several families in their natural environment, before ultimately zeroing in on Glendalis’ family in particular – simply because they were the least annoyed by her presence, according to the photographer.
Originally inspired by what she describes as the “cacophony of a family,” Cappetta soon began to notice parallels between this Puerto Rican clan and her own upbringing as a Gen X kid in a Mediterranean family, forging her way in the similarly racially and economically segregated city of New Haven, Connecticut. “Everybody lives multi generationally, you have no personal space, nobody has any boundaries,” Cappetta explains. “You’re shuttled from one house to another without any warning, you get shipped off to another city or another country for a couple of months in the summer.”
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Cappetta also deeply resonated with Glendalis as a fellow youngest daughter. The book frames the girl as its protagonist, the centre point around which other family members orbit, which was in part inspired by the artist’s search for her own girlhood in these photos. However, this wasn’t necessarily apparent to Cappetta when she was shooting the project: “I didn’t set out to make her the nucleus of the project, it just kind of happened after I showed the work to a curator at MoMA,” she says. “I was showing her a preliminary edit of the prints and the MoMA viewing room is one of the few places where you actually have enough room to put all your work out.
“[The curator] very wisely said, ‘Why don’t you just call it Glendalis because she seems to be becoming the nucleus of the work?’ I hadn’t realised that until she offered this beautiful understanding of it, and then the editing really took shape.”
The images, which track Glendalis from childhood through to her mid-teens, capture this strikingly beautiful girl in various environments, from her crowded and chaotic home to the streets and fields of lower Manhattan. Whatever her surroundings, Glendalis is an undeniably captivating subject, exuding a delicate feminine strength in every image. Over 112 pages, the photos are presented without captions on a plain white background – Cappetta explains this was a conscious decision by the book’s publisher, who felt strongly that the images should speak for themselves.
“The one caption I did want to include is on the very last picture in the book, which is of me. I wanted it to say underneath: ‘The author by Glendalis herself,’ but my publisher said, ‘Angela, we don’t usually have it handed to us this easily – this is obviously the last picture of the book. And it doesn’t need to be clarified. And I just said, ‘Sure, why not?’”
In Glendalis and her surroundings, Cappetta hopes the viewer will see something that resonates with their own lives. “My training is that a picture is not what happened, it’s a new thing and it has its own story to tell,” she says. “My greatest hope is that somebody will look at a picture and read it in a way that works for them.”
Glendalis: The Life And World Of A Youngest Daughter is available now from L’Artiere
Gary Grimes is a freelance writer based in London, covering pop culture, music and visual art for publications including Dazed, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Face and more
