Totowa Book of the Dead, Pg 4

Totowa Book of the Dead -pg. 4

I started photographing Paterson and Totowa in 1975. I took my first photography class as a junior in high school. In those days, photography was part of the Shop Department, thrown in there with woodworking and auto mechanics. My teacher lived on the corner of my street. We had massive punch ball games when we were kids and he always yelled at us for hitting his car with the ball. I felt a little uncomfortable when I found out he was going to be my teacher, but he turned out to be a nice guy. I ended up getting a 'D' in the class for cutting too many times, but this did not deter my love for the craft.

Sal Giardino May 8, 1935 - July 4, 1994. Kim Giardino June 11, 1966 - October 8, 1994. Betty Giardino Jun. 22, 1907 - May 10, 1997.

In the land of more dead than living, many of my friends were dying untimely deaths; car crashes, cancer, drugs, drownings and suicides. People I grew up with weren't living to see thirty. Then members of my family started to die. I had pictures of them all. My archive of negatives holds a personal documentary that spanned decades. As the years passed, I realized how much death and photography had inundated my life. Even photographs themselves have a life and a death. You can make a picture, wash and store it in an archival process, maybe even keep it for a hundred years but inevitably a negative and a photograph will fade away. I never expected to see the day that my pictures would outlive the people in them. I never expected that the people I loved would be the ones to all fade away.