Excerpt from the L.A. Times, 6 Photographers in Search of the City of Angels, Sunday, November 13, 1977
By Mark Jones
“The rich look and act alike all over the world,” the Italian-born photographer (Gusmano Cesaretti) said, “and they don’t really interest me like the underdogs in Los Angeles.”
Cesaretti, 31, the son of middle-class parents in Florence, Italy, is an energetic photographer, rarely seen without a Nikon strapped around his neck. In Los Angeles less than five years, he has published one photo book on barrio life and is completing another.
“I’ve been an underedog all my life because of the way things are in my country,” Cesaretti said with lightly accented English, “and I feel strongly for people in the same position. I’m sure I would be photographing the Chinese if I lived in San Francisco, or the Puerto Ricans if I was in New York.
“But in Los Angeles, I cannot overlook the Chicanos. They are the biggest subculture in the city.”
“Besides,” he added, “the faces of the Latin men and women in East L.A. are so much more expressive than in the rest of your city. It is as if the rest of the people in Los Angeles wear masks, pretending to be someone they aren’t.”
The Thrill Is Gone.
Photographs by Gusmano Cesaretti.
Damiani/Alleged Press, 2013. 160 pp., illustrated throughout, 9½x12½”.
Gusmano Cesaretti was born in 1946 in Lucca, Italy and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. Cesaretti has published two books: Street Writers – A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti, and Physical Graffiti-4×4=24. His photographs have been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Recent exhibitions include Art in the Streets, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), and This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs, at The Huntington Library (San Marino, CA). His photographs are in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian Institute (Washington D.C.) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA).
