Angel's World: The New York Photographs of Angelo Rizzuto

Angel’s World is Michael Lesy’s account of Angelo Rizzuto, a New York photographer who left an archive of about 60,000 pictures to the Library of Congress.

Rizzuto (1906–1967) went out with a camera at 2 p.m. every day between 1952 and 1964, working from above and on the street. The pictures include grand cityscapes, photographs of children, confrontational portraits of angry women and a near-daily self-portrait. Lesy first came across the archive in 1973, while looking for photographs of the 1950s in the Library’s Prints and Photographs division. Here he asks what the whole project was for. The text first appeared as part of Lesy’s Visible Light in 1985, and W. W. Norton published this book in New York.

Lesy (born 1945) is an American nonfiction writer whose books combine historical photographs with his own text. They include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (1976) and Murder City (2007). He taught at Hampshire College from 1990 to 2020 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for photography studies in 2013.