Angelo Antonio Rizzuto

Angelo Antonio Rizzuto (December 19, 1906 – 1967) was an American photographer who worked in Manhattan from 1952 until his death. His street photography opus of 60,000 images lay in file cabinets unviewed until 2001.

Early life Rizzuto grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. His parents were Sicilian immigrants Francesca and Antonio Rizzuto; Francesca had two sons from a previous relationship, Sam and Frank. He graduated from Wittenberg College in Ohio in 1931. He attended Harvard Law School in the mid-1930s. His father had a successful construction business, but when he died Rizzuto and his brothers fought over the estate, which drove Rizzuto to a suicide attempt in 1941, after which he was temporarily committed to a sanatorium. He lived in Manhattan, in a brownstone which he owned on 51st Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues which he is believed to have purchased with an inheritance after his brother died. Lesy first encountered these images in 1973 while looking for photographs of the 1950s in the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division. He later compiled them into a longer book entitled Angel’s World: The New York Photographs of Angelo Rizzuto. Rizzuto's collection of images in the Library of Congress is still largely undigitized; as of late 2021, 1400 images are available online.

The collection is described in a Library of Congress blog post as "carefully organized... by year, month, and date. The collection contains four kinds of material: (1) Contact sheets, 1952-1964, 10×10 inches... they represent all of the images in the negatives (2) Prints for an unpublished book called “Little Old New York,” 8×10 inches—all digitized and available online (3) Booklets and typescripts, filed in a supplemental archive (4) Film negatives, 1949–1967, 35mm and 120-size in 2.25 x 3.25 inches—preserved in cold storage"

The Library has encountered issues processing the collection because much of the material went undescribed by Rizzuto during his lifetime.