Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The lensman of Hunters Point

Long-time Hunters Point resident Frank Carrado used a simple digital camera that he received as a gift to create a one-of-a-kind photographic chronicle of his beloved neighborhood.

Resident's photo exhibit captures Hunter's Point in transition

Carrado, a gregarious 77-year-old Korean War veteran whose roots on Vernon Blvd. go back to 1940, got the Kodak camera in 2005 as a Christmas present from his daughter Ann Marie Romans.

Two years and thousands of photographs later, Carrado's homage to Hunters Point is on exhibit at the Greater Astoria Historical Society, funded in part through a $2,000 grant from the Queens Council on the Arts.

As he watched the old guard of Hunters Point pass on or be priced out, the rookie shutterbug started snapping shots as the gritty confines of his native turf quickly began giving way to an urban condo-land.

"I started taking pictures of the neighborhood because I knew that once they started building you would never see it again," he said. "I did it mostly for the children, so they'd have something to look back on - and show their children."

The exhibit, "Hunters Point In The Eyes of Her Son," includes more than 200 pictures on display - plus countless more in albums - that reveal a rapidly changing cityscape: historic buildings standing undisturbed or remodeled, and historic sites reincarnated as new structures or places.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

He's a great guy. He has an eye for documenting unwanted neighborhood change.

Anonymous said...

Do you folks have any images of the actual exhibit.

It seems to have set tongues wagging.

I understand that unlike treating LIC has a mound of construction debris, it actually shows the community being replaced by something out of the communist block.