A South Bronx Family Album

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When Ricky Flores started taking pictures as a high school senior in 1980, he did what a lot of young photographers did: he photographed his friends, family and neighbors. He captured giddy, even goofy moments, of dancers in the park, teenagers on stoops and costumed children o Halloween.

In the South Bronx.

His neighborhood was no stranger to cameras. But as he got older, Mr. Flores was bothered by how other photographers swooped into his Longwood neighborhood to make clichéd images that plumbed the depths of their preconceptions.

“If there was a picture in the newspaper from the block, it was always negative,” said Mr. Flores, who is now a staff photographer for The Journal News in Rockland County. “It was the image of the Puerto Rican wearing a bandanna with a knife in his pocket. But that wasn’t my experience. You know, my mom was a garment worker. She was very hard working, as were most people in my community.”

That sentiment guided his photography, which went from hobby to obsession. His images showed the full range of experience and emotion in Longwood â€" the same neighborhood that had been home decades earlier to Colin Powell. He shot the fires and ! those who fell to drugs, of course. But he also captured everyday images that often escaped others’ attention.

His images from that era will be on exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center in “Seis del Sur: Dispatches From Home by Six Nuyorican Photographers,” which opens Saturday. The show is a nuanced, insider’s view of an area that was as misunderstood as it was notorious. The show also includes Joe Conzo Jr., Francisco Molina Reyes II, Edwin Pagan, Angel Franco (a staff photographer for The New York Times) and David Gonzalez (co-editor of the Lens Blog).

Mr. Flores’s chronicle of Longwood is part of a deep archive of South Bronx life. He moved to a six-story walk up apartment on ox Street, in 1965, when the area was a vibrant, mostly black and Latino blue-collar neighborhood. He was a curious 5-year-old who played street games like Skelly, Kick the Can, Johnny on the Pony or Stoop Ball.

Ricky Flores Josie and Vinnie, 1984.

Although his father had recently died, others looked out for him. If he misbehaved, Mrs. Robinson â€" a one-woman neighborhood watch â€" would tell his mother by the time he got home.

Longwood may not have looked like the pristine communities he saw on television, but its sidewalks were alive with music, domino games and hard-working people leaving early and returning late from their jobs. Yes, there were drugs, yet any disputes were usually settled with fists.

Then the fires came.

As the old, brick! building! s in his neighborhood began to burn, Mr. Flores became a very, very light sleeper. Often he would wake up in the middle of the night to the screaming sirens and clanging bells of fire engines racing down the street.

“First thing you would do is pop up, make sure they’re not running into your apartment building and make sure that nothing bad was going on so you were secure,” he recalled.

He became hypervigilant, always worrying whether his building would be the next on the block to burn. As more blocks were reduced to clusters of charred, broken shells, landlords cut services to remaining buildings, eventually abandoning them or having them taken over by the city. A once-bustling neighborhood became a rubble-strewn urban prairie.

It got bad enough that even the city â€" the reluctant landlord of last resort â€" slowly turned its back on the community, too. The city stopped picking up abandoned cars that were left on the block, and it was common to see three or four cars sitting there ith the wheels off. This became the new normal for Mr. Flores.

A modest inheritance from his father let him buy his first camera â€" a Pentax with a 50-millimeter lens â€" when he was a senior at James Monroe High School. After attending college in Puerto Rico for a year he met Mel Rosenthal, a photographer teaching at the SUNY Empire State College. As he studied with Mr. Rosenthal â€" himself a sensitive chronicler of the South Bronx â€" Mr. Flores realized he had an opportunity, and a responsibility, to document what was really happening in his community.

By the late 80s, Mr. Flores moved farther north in the Bronx, but he continued to photograph the streets of his youth. He also photographed the politically charged protests over racial violence and freelanced for The Village Voice and The New York Times before landing a job at the Gannett-Westchest! er Rockla! nd newspapers.

Pablo Delano, a photographer and a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, often instructs his students to look at Mr. Flores’s “raw and real” photos to understand what an insider view can bring to documentary photography. Mr. Delano says that there is a role for both outsider and insider views, but that growing up in the Bronx and seeing the close-knit neighborhood unravel, then survive, gives Mr. Flores’s work an authority that no outsider can bring.

“He takes full advantage of what you get growing up with the smell of the place in your nostrils,” Mr. Delano said.

The memory of that era is still fresh for Mr. Flores. When Mr. Flores was a teenager, and the neighborhood was in steep decline, he had long discussions with his friends about what they would do with their lives.

“And the question for many of us was choice,” he said. â€What kind of life do you want to live Do we want to spend our entire lives living in that type of environment What would make us better people Changing our personalities or leaving the block Or was it both”

They would struggle over these issues, but Mr. Flores said that each one had a personal choice: many of his friends went to college, some became b-boys and rappers. And some were consumed by the streets.

Photography provided the path for Mr. Flores.

“I breathed it, I ate it, I slept with it,” he said. “It allowed me to look at what was taking place around me and figure out what was going on and what I wanted to do.”

Follow @followbdc, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook, as is Seis del Sur.

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