Street photography is about the intermingling of light, place, and timing – or the good fortune of serendipity. In a recent post in Canadian Writers Abroad, Debra Martens notes, in reference to a photo that I made of two girls walking with a red umbrella in an Italian piazza, and published in Where Angels Come to Earth, that the book’s author - writer Mark Frutkin - compares the book’s photographer (me) to a fisherman: “The photographer must have the same patience as the fisherman, ever alert to the precise moment when the shutter must be pressed, the rod lifted, the line pulled tight. The photographer must have perfect timing to catch a fish of light glistening in air. For the moment passes in an instant, the scene has changed, the two girls walking arm in arm have crossed the piazza, turned a corner, disappeared into the rest of their lives.” (Where Angels, Longbridge Books, 2020, p. 115) canadianwritersabroad.com/2020/03/24/gathering-places/ #photography #piazza

Thank you @librissimi1 Toronto Italian Book Festival for inviting me and Mark to present our book Where Angels Come to Earth. Kudos for breaking new ground with a successful zoom show. #librissimi2020 #librissimivirtuale2020 #angels #Italian piazza #accenti

Please join me and Mark Frutkin, celebrated novelist and poet, on a Zoom book presentation of our latest book, Where Angels Come to Earth: An Evocation of the Italian Piazza. We are of the Librissimi Virtual Book Festival, which will be live streamed on Saturday May 9th, beginning at 1:00 p.m. (Toronto time). To join the Zoom Piazza book event, you must register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OCHJ3IAEQXC5IG7hF6Pi8Q There will be five presentations, and ours will begin at 5:00 p.m. and run for about 40 minutes. Our book, which features an introduction by Ken Greenberg (2020 Order of Canada Member), celebrates the humanity of the piazza — the grit and beauty of daily life. Normally brimming with life, today they are eerily empty due to Covid-19, and we present our book look forward to better days piazzas full of life again. It will also be available live on Facebook and Youtube, each with respective links provided. Stay safe, and enjoy the Zoom show. #piazza #angels #markfrutkinwriter #vincenzopietropaolo #photography

Covid-19 has finally revealed how dependent Canadians are on the 30,000+ foreign seasonal farm workers from Mexico, Jamaica and other countries who come up to our farms every year and grow most of our food. When I started to document them in the 1980s, I called my project Essential Workers. But it was a confusing term, as people thought I was photographing doctors, nurses or first responders. Long unnoticed by most Canadians, the pandemic crisis has finally put the migrant farmworkers on the radar, and for the first time, they have been referred as essential workers at least in the media. But will this be enough to improve their wages, working conditions, or labour rights? #COVID19 #photography #HarvestPilgrims

Today, the first Good Friday in the age of coronavirus, the streets of Toronto's historic Little Italy are mostly deserted. For the first time since 1962, the annual procession of Good Friday -- a reenactment of the Via Crucis (The Way of the Cross) with live actors and statues representing Biblical tableaux, as tens of thousands of people gathered in devotion on every street -- has been cancelled. The cancellation has deeply personal resonances for me, for I had photographed the event every year for 50 years, in what slowly became my own personal ritual of photography, and eventually a book, Ritual (2016). Now I wonder: will the historic procession re-emerge, or will it have succumbed to the mercilessness of coronavirus a year or two from now? #photography #covid19 #GoodFriday

Today, Palm Sunday, the streets of Spain are completely deserted, due to the COVOD-19 lockdown. The atmosphere is tragic and surreal, and I would like to share my project Semana Santa in Salamanca, Spain, to show how thousands of people would normally have gathered on the streets today. Palm Sunday, or Domingo de Ramos, sets off Semana Santa, a week-long celebration involving elaborate religious processions with statues. In a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, robes and cloaks with hoods that hide the person's face are worn by the most devout, as a personal sign of penance. #photography #palmsunday #covid19

For centuries, the piazzas of Italy have been the quintessential public places of social interaction, but the coronavirus pandemic has tragically reduced them into forlorn, deserted  spaces. As humans are being forced to interact digitally more than ever before, photography has indisputably become a virtual piazza, as I indicated in my book Where Angels Come to Earth: An Evocation of the Italian Piazza, in collaboration with Mark Frutkin, and published just as the pandemic took hold. http://accenti.ca/store #photography #piazza #covid_19

Thanks Peter Higdon Centre for the opportunity to talk about my research labour photographs in the Black Star Photo Collection yesterday! Here's a gem from the Collection: coal miners share their lunch with their work mate, a pit pony, Cape Breton Island,  1950c. #photography #ryerson #toronto

#thatchalkgirl #YodaSanta #MerryChristmas

#FirstPost #SeasonsGreetings