Paul D’Amato (b. 1956) was raised in Boston and attended Boston Latin School during a period marked by racial unrest, civil rights protests, and school bussing. He later moved to Oregon to study at Reed College, where he says he learned as much from traveling cross-country, often hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, as he did in the classroom.
After earning his MFA from Yale, D’Amato relocated to Chicago, where he began photographing in the Latino communities of Pilsen and Little Village. The images and essays he created over fourteen years, despite having to move to Maine for a teaching position, became the basis for his book Barrio (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
D’Amato returned to Chicago in 2001 to teach at Columbia College and has since focused his work on the Black community on the city’s near west side. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy.
In 2013, his ongoing series We Shall was exhibited at the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago and accompanied by a catalog of the same name.
Other works available upon request.
