Talking cameras and the next 15 years of exhibits with 91-year-old photographer Dom Quartuccio
“I’m going to tell you a little about this camera,” Dom Quartuccio said. “This is the period when I went to high school.”
Mr. Quartuccio is a 91-year-old commercial photographer whose work is on display at the Italian American Museum on Mulberry Street through Nov. 29. He developed a love for photography while a student at Straubenmuller Textile High School in Chelsea in the early 1940s.
But Mr. Quartuccio wasn’t talking about one of his cameras. He was admiring a Kodak with a bellows that I’d brought along to his studio on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria. I picked mine up at a garage sale during the 1960s and it was ancient then.
I was aware that the photographer owned several of similar vintage.
Mine still worked when I was a teenager—using 616 film that produced large negatives—even though most of my pictures came out blurry.
Unlike the Instamatic cameras of that era, I felt as if I were engaged in the creative process—a junior Ansel Adams—even if I had no idea what I was doing.
ENLARGE“You put it on 15 feet and it would be pretty good with most pictures,” Mr. Quartuccio remembered. “When you want to take landscapes just put in on infinity.”
If only I’d known that secret back then. I eventually discovered it on my own, but only after months of trial and error. And major disappointment every time I picked up my prints at the camera store.
“This was a great lens,” he went on. “The same lens I had in high school.”
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia presented Mr. Quartuccio with an award for his photography as a high-school student in 1942. He went on to a career with clients that included Eastern Airlines, Reader’s Digest, Ford, Seiko watches, the Sony Corporation of America and Union Carbide.
Many of the photographs in the exhibit at the Italian American Museum are of Little Italy, where Mr. Quartuccio grew up, in the 1930s and 1940s, and events such as St. Ciro’s Feast. It was held on Elizabeth Street.
“He lived on Elizabeth Street, which was the Sicilian street,” explained Dr. Joseph Scelsa, the Italian American museum’s president and CEO, when I visited the show. “Mulberry was the Neapolitan street.”
The film director Martin Scorsese also grew up on Elizabeth Street.
‘He captures the essence of what it is to be an Italian-American in the middle part of the 20th Century.’
“Today, when you have the Feast of San Gennaro, it’s not necessarily the people who live here,” Dr. Scelsa said as we examined a photograph by Mr. Quartuccio of the buoyant crowds at St. Ciro’s Feast. “But this was people coming out of their homes and participating just like they do in the small towns of Italy.”
He added that Mr. Quartuccio deserves to be appreciated not just for his career but also as a product of a neighborhood that is fading into history. “He captures the essence of what it is to be an Italian-American in the middle part of the 20th Century.”
I discovered that the photographer and I had something in common, beyond a reverence for antiquated camera equipment. We don’t throw anything away.
“I have 25,000 color slides, all Kodak, going back to 1945,” Mr. Quartuccio boasted.
And they’re meticulously labeled and stored in file cabinets. Indeed, his studio, which contains a dark room and posters on the walls of his work for clients such as Panasonic, doubles as a shrine to his career.
ENLARGEHe attributes his longevity to preserving his legacy. “I come in here every day like a workday,” Mr. Quartuccio said. “That’s why I’m here today.”
He dreams of a museum devoted to his work and says he has ideas for shows into the year 2030. “I have three exhibitions ready to go. I have at least 15 years of exhibitions. It’s got to be in my will.”
Mr. Quartuccio has no children. “Two things bother me,” he confided. “When I’m gone everything is going to be thrown in a dumpster. I’ve put so much effort into my life. So much passion. I need someone like Donald Trump to get it done.”
But Dom Quartuccio has been luckier than most. “I saw 37 countries not once, but 10 times,” on photography assignments, he told me. “I’ll never retire. Unless I’m gone.”
Write to Ralph Gardner Jr. at ralph.gardner@wsj.com