Old timers: the Italians

The photographs are portraits of elderly Italian Americans, the first generation of immigrants who arrived in America during the early twentieth-century wave of European migration. Marinelli made them in the late 1970s, before that generation passed away, and frames them as a record of a disappearing past. The approach is direct: critics quoted in the book describe the images as honest and direct, and Marinelli's stated model was Edward S. Curtis's documentary portraits of Native Americans, though his pictures draw on his own memories of the community. The book is a monograph by one photographer, with text and photographs by Marinelli. It includes quoted comments by Ralph Gibson and Sean Kernan, who praise the work's honesty and the affection it shows for its subjects.