Italian Photographer Gusmano Cesaretti’s Chronicles of East LA

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has acquired the archives of Italian-born photographer Gusmano Cesaretti, who has documented the communities and built environment of Los Angeles for nearly six decades. The acquisition comprises roughly 238 boxes of photographs, negatives, artist books, and other artwork and ephemera.

“Photographs are the anchor of the archive, but it is also about the lives he touched and interacted with, telling different stories about LA history and culture,” Linde B. Lehtinen, the Huntington’s senior curator of photography, told Hyperallergic.

Casaretti’s archives join the Huntington Library’s collection of 800,000 photographs, ranging from early historical images of Los Angeles to Carleton Watkins’s Western landscapes, John Humble’s vibrant color photos of LA’s urban tapestry, and a recent group of works by the late artist Laura Aguilar.

Cesaretti emigrated from his native Italy to the United States at the age of 19, arriving in Chicago before settling in LA in 1967. Between 1971 and 1973, he worked as a staff photographer at the Huntington, developing his skills while documenting its artwork and gardens.

“I have a personal connection to the institution, but never had considered they would be interested in my work since they were mostly focused on classic art and scientific documents,” Cesaretti said in an interview with Hyperallergic. “When they reached out to me for a studio visit and mentioned that they were expanding their photo collection, I jumped at the possibility of them being interested in acquiring my photographs.”

Cesaretti spent his time off in East LA, photographing graffiti writers, lowrider clubs, and Latinx families, portraying them with a sense of honesty and respect. He acquainted himself with the city by driving through its different neighborhoods, recalling that areas like Beverly Hills lacked street life, “but in East LA, you saw families enjoying themselves outside, children playing in the street.”

“Coming from the town in Italy where my uncles lived across the street, we lived in a big house with my grandmother and an aunt, and all the neighbors were people who had been there for generations, I was comfortable with the dynamics,” he said.

He met artist Chaz Bojorquez, who would “translate” the blocky, rigid form of the Cholo-style graffiti covering the streets, a collaboration that resulted in Cesaretti’s first book Street Writers: A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti (1975). He would go on to chronicle other Angeleno communities, including the Klique car club for the series East LA Diary (1970s); police recruits in Police Academy, Los Angeles (1979–1980); and the nascent punk scene with Punks, Los Angeles (1982). He focused his lens internationally as well, with subsequent series documenting a folk healer in Oaxaca, Rio de Janeiro’s red-light district, and gun culture in Colón, Panama.

Since the late 1970s, Cesaretti has also been a visual consultant for Hollywood, collaborating with director Michael Mann on films and TV shows including Miami Vice (1985–1989), Heat (1995), Ali (2001), and Ferrari (2024). From 2011 to 2014, he made his own documentary, Take None Give None (2016), focused on a multiracial motorcycle club in South Central.

Although he is an “outsider” to many of the communities he has photographed, Cesaretti has been able to earn the trust of his subjects, resulting in notably candid and sincere images.

“He is respectful but gets to their essence, a remarkable combination that produces such exceptional and deeply felt work,” Lehtinen said.

Cesaretti recalled working as a movie location scout and returning to the home of a family he had photographed three decades earlier to find his image still hanging on their wall alongside other family photos.

“That really moved me,” he told Hyperallergic. “I think that my way of shooting people, wanting to know my subjects and then shooting them in their own environment, proud to be who they were — that is what probably came out in my photos from that era.”