THE BLOCK by Herb Goro
Published in 1970 by Random House.
An amazing document of inner city life.
"An account, in pictures and text, of the greatest social disaster in American history: a close-up of the death of a New York City slum and the destruction of the people who live there.
The book is the result of a year spent by the photographer Herb Goro in a decayed slum in New York's East Bronx. More than a hundred fifty thousand inhabitants of the area live and die in the rotted, sometimes abandonend tenements. The text consist of tape-recorded interviews with the people whom we see in the pictures - the tenants, the police, the men and women dying, and the parents of the children being born, Theirs is the hopeless struggle to survive in the city which has no need for these people and which barely manages any longer to even keep them alive.
THE BLOCK shows us how the people in this neighborhood live, but it concentrates on the lives of three adolescents, as they come of age, struggle briefly to survive, and fail. In New York there are countless people, many of them hardly more than children, who live and die like those on THE BLOCK. This book confronts us with a profound social pathology and with the personal misery that accompanies it."
An amazing document of inner city life.
"An account, in pictures and text, of the greatest social disaster in American history: a close-up of the death of a New York City slum and the destruction of the people who live there.
The book is the result of a year spent by the photographer Herb Goro in a decayed slum in New York's East Bronx. More than a hundred fifty thousand inhabitants of the area live and die in the rotted, sometimes abandonend tenements. The text consist of tape-recorded interviews with the people whom we see in the pictures - the tenants, the police, the men and women dying, and the parents of the children being born, Theirs is the hopeless struggle to survive in the city which has no need for these people and which barely manages any longer to even keep them alive.
THE BLOCK shows us how the people in this neighborhood live, but it concentrates on the lives of three adolescents, as they come of age, struggle briefly to survive, and fail. In New York there are countless people, many of them hardly more than children, who live and die like those on THE BLOCK. This book confronts us with a profound social pathology and with the personal misery that accompanies it."
posted by - at
2:26 PM
8 Comments:
looks very interesting!
I just ordered Amazon.com.
thank you for sharing, boogie.
anytime - I had no clue they had it on Amazon
Amazon has almost everything, except your SAO PAULO! still waiting for it......
I know ... I don't get it at all, but there's nothing I can do.
don't worry, boogie.
j don't :)
My mothers family is featured in this book. She has a framed copy of the book cover hanging in the living room to remind her of where she's come from.
My father owned a copy of this book. I can remember flipping through the pages studying the images for hours. A career soldier, my father never expressed his emotions, never questioned authority, only later in life did he become more vocal. He once said to me as I read the stories of the images in this book; "Be thankful for what you have."
A powerful piece of photojournalism.
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