GME Reflects On Raimondo Borea's Boys' Town Of Italy Photo Essay In Honor of Italian-American Heritage Month
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A CHILD READS IN A CLASSROOM IN BOYS’ TOWN OF ITALY. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RAIMONDO BOREA, CIRCA 1950. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
Raimondo Borea was born in Rome in 1926 and immigrated to the United States in 1953. Within a few years, he secured work as a freelance photographer, traveling around New York City on his three-speed Dunelt bicycle. He created photographic essays of now-demolished New York City landmarks, including the Third Avenue El and the Washington Square Market. He also extensively photographed the city’s parks and subway system. By the end of the decade, he was granted unlimited behind-the-scenes access to the Tonight Show, the Today Show, and Firing Line, and photographed their many famous hosts and guests. His work appeared in numerous publications — like Ladies’ Home Journal, National Review, Popular Photography, and Pageant — and in countless books.
Borea once remarked:
Photography enables me to discover, observe [and] understand things about people and their relationships, and it allows me to capture and hold them forever. Photography is an expression of your individuality… you can create an almost infinite number of ways to make a photograph.
Before fashioning a career as a prolific image-maker in the States, Borea was an emerging photo essayist in Rome who took candid portraits of orphaned and homeless war children housed in the Boys’ Town of Italy.
TWO BOYS POLISH A DORMITORY FLOOR WITH A MOP. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RAIMONDO BOREA, CIRCA 1950. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
In the wake of World War II, Rome was overpopulated with orphaned children who lived in the streets — stealing, panhandling, and shining shoes to survive. Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing, an Irish priest working at the Vatican during this period, was moved by these children’s dire circumstances and appealed to the Pope to establish a support system for them. As noted in Carroll-Abbing’s July 11, 2001 obituary in the New York Times: “‘I said to the Pope, someone ought to do something,’ he recalled. Pius XII agreed. But when the monsignor began, he said, all he had was the Pope's permission to assist the refugee population of Italy.” In other words, Boys’ Town did not receive direct funding from the Vatican. As a result, Carroll-Abbing sought support in the U.S. and established a Boys’ Town of Italy there (also known as “American Relief for Italy”), which raised funds for his project in Rome. Today, numerous letters are housed in the New York Public Library archives, from Italian children, thanking American children for their aid. Both the Boys' Town and Girls' Town of Rome remain self-governing communities supported largely by the organization that Carroll-Abbing founded in the United States.
In creating Boys’ Town of Italy, Carroll-Abbing started with what he called his “Shoe Shine Hotel,” a basement shelter in a war-damaged, abandoned school. His concept of giving love and “a chance in life” to children in need grew as he organized shelters all over Italy. In addition to Boys’ Town, he organized eight permanent children's villages and 40 temporary shelters, and built 30 children's day-care centers in southern Italy. Ultimately, Carroll-Abbing was credited with feeding, clothing, and educating more than 180,000 children. His philanthropic work made him something of a celebrity, as evidenced by his appearance in the popular U.S. game show To Tell the Truth on December 30th, 1963:
Borea’s Boys’ Town photo essay is characterized by warmth and authenticity, emphasizing moments of care and camaraderie between the children, as well as everyday activities (e.g. completing chores, eating meals, attending school), without ever feeling posed or contrived. Through inventive use of light, framing, and perspective, Borea transmutes his relatively modest subjects and environs into expressions of remarkable beauty. Borea also manages to capture the children’s interactions with Msgr. Carroll-Abbing from various, engaging perspectives — alternating from an intimate close-up involving four of the boys, to a shot of the larger group gathered adoringly around their leader and advocate.
CHILDREN MILLING ABOUT THE ENTRANCE OF THEIR SCHOOL. PHOTOGRAPHED BY RAIMONDO BOREA, CIRCA 1950. SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
The legacy of Boys’ Town of Italy — and the period of Italian history in which it’s situated — lives on today. Notably, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation will screen Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) — which the director was inspired to make after witnessing all of the undernourished Italian boys following the American troops in the wake of World War II, clutching their shoeshine boxes and crying “Shoosha” in their desperate attempt to make a little bit of money — on Saturday, November 11th, 2023. The film will be available on demand for 72 hours beginning at 7pm EST; the film can also be viewed with a live commentary on Monday, November 13th.
GME exclusively represents the work of Raimondo Borea, and we are committed to resurrecting the career of this overlooked photographer through licensing his photographs, republishing his out-of-print books, mounting curated exhibitions, and identifying a long-term repository for this significant collection of photographic works.
Please contact David Deitch, Fine Arts Curator, at david@gartenbergmedia.com, for all inquiries related to GME’s photography collections.
Enjoy these additional selections from Borea’s Boys’ Town of Italy series:
