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Professors awarded Lange-Taylor Documentary PrizeMary Cappello, a writer and English professor at the University of Rhode Island, and Paola Ferrario, a faculty member of photography at Rhode Island College, will combine their talents of word and image to document the lives of new immigrants to Italy. The 2001 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Documentary Prize, given by The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, is funding their work. Only one $10,000 prize is awarded each year. The Cappello/Ferrario project is called: "Pane Amaro/Bitter Bread: The Struggle of New Immigrants to Italy." Both curious and sensitive about the metamorphosis of their country of cultural origin as a point of destination rather than departure, Ferrario and Cappello plan to travel into rural areas of Italy where immigrant lives often go undocumented, where immigrants are making lives, living with Italians, and communicating bi-culturally. The pair will document the lives of immigrants in Veneto, Emiglia Romagna, and Chieti Abruzzi, places of national pride, famous for their cheese and cured meat, the production of which is now strongly dependent on immigrant labor. Cappello and Ferrario met while Cappello was studying Italian at RIC. Ferrario is from Milan who left Italy to pursue life and work as a photographer in the U.S. Her work, Inheritance: The Elder Relative Series, documents the sentimental debris left by relatives as an attempt to prolong an existence that is now gone. Cappello's recent memoir Night Bloom: An Italian/American Life, is a complex look at three generations of immigrant voices. The Lange-Taylor prize was created to encourage collaboration between documentary writers and photographers in the tradition of the acclaimed photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor who published American Exodus in 1941, a seminal work in documentary studies. By Jan Wenzel |
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