Robert D’Alessandro found one of his most enduring subjects almost everywhere he looked: hanging from houses, painted across clothing, attached to cars, displayed outside businesses, carried by individuals, and woven into the visual fabric of American life. The subject was the American flag, a symbol so familiar that it could easily disappear into the background until D’Alessandro’s camera made viewers notice it again.
Born in New York City in 1942 and raised in the Bronx, D’Alessandro emerged as a photographer during the late 1960s, when documentary photography was increasingly being used not simply to describe American life but to question how that life was represented. His photographs traveled from Brooklyn and Manhattan to New Jersey, Long Island, Memphis, Albuquerque, and other parts of the country, recording people and places while repeatedly encountering the Stars and Stripes in unexpected contexts.
Those photographs eventually became Glory, his remarkable 1973 book of black-and-white images centered on the American flag. Rather than explaining what the flag should mean, D’Alessandro photographed the many different meanings people had already attached to it. Created during a period marked by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and widespread debate over American ideals, the series could be patriotic, ironic, uneasy, affectionate, funny, disturbing, and ambiguous, sometimes all within the same image.
📷 Growing Up With an Idea of America
D’Alessandro grew up in the Bronx in a family shaped by immigration and by a strong belief in American ideals. His immigrant father instilled in him a deep respect for the principles that the United States claimed to represent, and that background became significant when D’Alessandro began photographing the country during a period when many Americans were openly questioning how closely those national ideals matched lived reality.
Photography gave him a way to investigate that tension without reducing it to a simple argument. He did not need to write slogans beneath the pictures because the symbols and contradictions were already there. A flag flying above a suburban house carries one set of associations, while the same flag painted across clothing, hanging beside a welfare office, displayed at a courthouse, or appearing in an economically struggling neighborhood can produce an entirely different response.
D’Alessandro recognized that a familiar symbol changes according to who is using it, where it appears, and what surrounds it. That sensitivity to context became one of the defining features of his photography.
🎨 From Graphic Design to Photography
D’Alessandro’s visual education included graphic design before photography became central to his career. He studied graphic design at Pratt Institute and later pursued graduate work in photography at Brooklyn College, bringing with him a strong awareness of composition, typography, geometry, and the visual relationships between objects.
That background can be seen throughout his photographs. His work is documentary, but it is also highly alert to graphic structure. A flag may divide the picture into bold geometric forms, while stars and stripes compete with architectural lines. A human figure may occupy only a small part of the frame while a symbol dominates everything around it. Signs, advertisements, fences, storefronts, cars, clothing, and buildings become part of carefully balanced compositions.
D’Alessandro did not simply find interesting subjects and point the camera toward them. He organized what he saw, using the visual discipline of design to make ordinary scenes more revealing.
🏙️ Photography in a Changing New York
By the late 1960s, D’Alessandro was working as a freelance photographer in and around New York, a city that offered an almost unlimited visual environment. Neighborhoods could change dramatically within a few subway stops, wealth and poverty existed close together, political messages competed with commercial advertising, and streets were constantly being rewritten by new fashions, new signs, new buildings, and new populations.
D’Alessandro photographed this environment without trying to polish it. People are often encountered exactly where they happen to be, and a street corner, sidewalk, storefront, or side of a building can become enough to sustain an image. This directness connects him with the broader tradition of American street photography, but his pictures frequently contain an additional layer of social observation because he was interested not only in people but in the signs and symbols surrounding them.
America, in D’Alessandro’s photographs, was constantly describing itself. His camera recorded that description.
🇺🇸 Seeing the Flag Everywhere
The idea for Glory grew from a remarkably simple observation: the American flag was everywhere. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it appeared not merely on government buildings but throughout popular culture and everyday life. People wore it, businesses displayed it, protesters used it, supporters of government policy used it, critics used it, and advertisers incorporated it into commercial imagery.
That instability fascinated D’Alessandro because the flag could communicate pride, anger, belonging, rebellion, grief, nostalgia, commercial appeal, or several of those feelings at once. A symbol usually associated with national unity had become capable of communicating dramatically different ideas depending upon context.
Instead of deciding which interpretation was legitimate, D’Alessandro photographed the variety. That decision gives Glory much of its lasting power.
📕 Glory
Published by Elephant Publishing Corporation in 1973, Glory brought together twenty-five black-and-white photographs in which the American flag appears as a recurring visual element. The photographs were made in locations including New York City, Brooklyn, Long Island, New Jersey, Memphis, and Albuquerque, giving the project a geographic range that prevented it from becoming the portrait of one neighborhood or social group.
Images such as Hank’s Flag, Eastport, New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, Welfare Department, Fourteenth St, New York City, Courthouse, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Memphis, Tennessee, and Wayne Jones, Westhampton Beach, New York, July 4th, 1970 demonstrate how differently the same symbol can function depending upon its surroundings.
The landscapes change, the buildings change, and the people change, but the flag remains. That repetition gives the book its structure while also making each variation more noticeable.
🧠 A Series That Refuses to Explain Itself
One reason Glory remains so interesting is that D’Alessandro does not give viewers a single emotional instruction. Some photographs may initially seem humorous, while others feel solemn or uneasy. Some suggest contradiction immediately, while others appear straightforward until a small detail changes the tone.
The viewer has to interpret the relationship between symbol, person, and environment. That ambiguity is particularly effective with an object as culturally loaded as a flag because any attempt to reduce its meaning to one message would flatten the project.
If D’Alessandro had simply photographed flags waving dramatically against beautiful skies, the series would have become predictable very quickly. Instead, he looked for places where symbolism became complicated. The flag may be grand, ordinary, commercial, personal, ceremonial, or almost absurd, sometimes within the same body of work.
🚩 A Symbol Belongs to Whoever Uses It
Flags are unusual visual objects because they have official meanings while also being available for personal use. A government can define a flag, but it cannot completely control what people do with it. Someone may display it outside a home, another person may sew it onto clothing, someone else may carry it during a demonstration, and a business may use it to attract customers.
D’Alessandro’s photographs become especially compelling when these meanings overlap. The flag retains its national identity, but it also becomes part of an individual’s identity. His camera records that negotiation between the official and the personal without insisting that one meaning should cancel the other.
That is why the series feels less like a statement about the flag itself than an investigation of how people live with symbols.
🛣️ Traveling Through the United States
Although New York remained important, Glory demonstrates that D’Alessandro’s photographic attention extended well beyond his home city. Memphis, Albuquerque, New Jersey, and Long Island all appear, allowing him to test whether the visual language he had noticed in New York belonged to a larger American experience.
It did. The landscapes changed, the architecture changed, and the social environments changed, yet the flag kept reappearing. That repetition creates one of the book’s most effective visual rhythms because each photograph becomes both an individual observation and another variation on the same national symbol.
The geographic range also prevents the project from defining America through a single region. D’Alessandro’s country is fragmented, diverse, contradictory, and connected by images people continually reuse.
🏜️ Albuquerque & the American West
One of D’Alessandro’s documented periods outside New York brought him to New Mexico. He served as photographer in residence at the University of New Mexico in 1973, and photographs from Albuquerque became part of his broader body of work.
The shift in geography expanded his visual vocabulary because New Mexico offered a dramatically different architecture, light, landscape, and cultural environment from New York. Yet D’Alessandro continued finding the American flag embedded within everyday spaces, suggesting that the symbol remained useful to him precisely because it changed meaning as the surrounding environment changed.
His Courthouse, Albuquerque, New Mexico places the flag within a civic setting, where its symbolic function is connected directly with government and public authority. Other Albuquerque photographs reveal how the same national imagery could operate differently within the visual environment of the American Southwest.
👥 Race, Class & Alienation
Race, class, and alienation were recurring concerns within D’Alessandro’s photography, although these themes do not always appear through explicitly staged political scenes. More often, they emerge through relationships between people and the spaces they occupy.
Who occupies a neighborhood? What kind of building stands behind someone? How is a street maintained? What signs appear in the background? Who stands beside the flag, and who seems distant from it? D’Alessandro allows these questions to develop visually rather than turning his photographs into written arguments.
Photography can suggest social structures without converting them into statistics. A street already contains information about economics, clothing contains information, architecture contains information, and body language contains information. D’Alessandro left those clues inside the frame and trusted viewers to notice them.
✊ Photography During a Period of Social Conflict
D’Alessandro began making his major early work during an unsettled period in American history. The Civil Rights Movement had transformed public debate about racial equality and citizenship, while the Vietnam War generated intense disagreement over American foreign policy. Political assassinations, protest movements, and the Watergate scandal contributed to deep arguments about authority, democracy, and national identity.
Glory emerged directly from that atmosphere, when Americans were debating what the flag represented and whether the country’s ideals matched its actions. D’Alessandro’s achievement was to photograph that argument without turning the series into a conventional editorial.
He does not photograph one side and declare it America. He photographs many versions of America, allowing the contradictions between them to remain visible.
🧍 People Inside the Symbolic Landscape
Although the flag provides Glory with its organizing idea, the people are just as important. Some appear aware of the camera, while others seem absorbed in their own lives. In one image, a flag may dominate the frame while a person appears almost incidental; elsewhere, someone’s clothing transforms the flag into something intimate and bodily.
That relationship between person and symbol becomes one of the series’ recurring tensions. A national symbol is abstract, while a person is specific. The United States can be described as an idea, but D’Alessandro photographs the people who actually have to live inside that idea.
His images become strongest when those two levels meet: the large national narrative and the small individual life.
🖤 Why Black & White Matters
Although the American flag is normally defined by red, white, and blue, Glory is a black-and-white photographic project. Removing color strips away one of the flag’s most immediately recognizable qualities and shifts attention toward pattern, contrast, shape, stars, and stripes.
A brightly colored flag naturally attracts the eye, but in D’Alessandro’s photographs the symbol has to coexist with the rest of the composition. Architecture, faces, pavement, clothing, sky, and signage all occupy the same tonal world.
The black-and-white format also links the project with the visual language of postwar documentary and street photography, allowing the pictures to feel observational even when their symbolism becomes highly charged.
🏛️ The Christmas Bar
The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds D’Alessandro’s 1974 photograph The Christmas Bar, a gelatin silver print depicting a New York street scene outside a commercial tavern. Men, architecture, signage, and the urban environment come together in an image that demonstrates his continued interest in everyday city life even beyond the concentrated flag imagery of Glory.
The photograph also reveals how naturally D’Alessandro found subjects in ordinary spaces. There is no need for a major event or famous person. A neighborhood business can contain enough visual information because people and their surroundings tell the story together.
That same attentiveness to the everyday runs throughout his work.
👒 Untitled (Women and City Theme)
Another D’Alessandro work in the Smithsonian collection is Untitled (Women and City Theme), a 1978 photomechanical reproduction centered on figures within an urban setting. The medium itself is worth noticing because D’Alessandro was not restricted to traditional gelatin silver prints.
The work reflects an interest in how photographs can circulate beyond the singular darkroom print. Photography can exist as an original object, but it can also travel through books, portfolios, reproductions, magazines, and printed multiples.
That ability to circulate was particularly important for socially observant photography because an image hidden in a private collection reaches very few people, while a printed image can move through a much larger public world.
📚 The Photobook as an Argument
Glory demonstrates why the photobook became such an important form for 20th-century photographers. A single image can suggest an idea, but a sequence can develop one gradually.
As the viewer turns the pages, another flag appears, and then another, and then another. Repetition changes the way the object is seen. After several photographs, the flag can no longer function merely as background decoration because the reader begins actively searching for it.
Where is it this time? Who is beside it? How is it being used? What changed from the previous picture? The book turns looking into a cumulative experience and allows meaning to build through comparison rather than explanation.
🖼️ From Glory to Landscapes and Other Images
D’Alessandro’s career extended well beyond his early flag photographs. His exhibition history includes The Life Fantastic in New York in 1972, Glory exhibitions in Berlin and at the International Museum of Photography in 1977, Photographs by Robert D’Alessandro in Riverhead, New York, in 1981, and Landscapes and Other Images at New York’s Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery in 1982. A solo exhibition at Picture Photo Space in Osaka followed in 1990.
Those exhibitions are a reminder not to reduce D’Alessandro entirely to one project. Glory may provide the clearest entry into his work, but his broader practice encompassed street photography, landscape, portraiture, and examinations of everyday American environments.
The camera kept moving, even after the flag series had established his reputation.
🎓 Photography & Teaching
Teaching became another major part of D’Alessandro’s career. His professional record includes positions at the New School for Social Research, New York University, the University of New Mexico, the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, and particularly Brooklyn College, where he joined the faculty in 1974.
That work placed him within another important strand of postwar photography. Many influential photographers did not separate artistic practice from teaching, and universities and art schools became crucial places where photography was increasingly treated as a serious fine-art discipline rather than merely a commercial or journalistic craft.
D’Alessandro participated directly in that shift. He made photographs while helping other people learn how to think through cameras, composition, sequencing, context, and representation.
🏆 Grants & Recognition
D’Alessandro received significant institutional support while his photographic career was developing. His professional record includes a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant in 1971 and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1975, followed by additional New York arts and research grants.
His work also entered important public collections, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House—now the George Eastman Museum—the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center.
The Library of Congress also preserves D’Alessandro photographs within its Selected Photographers 1970 and 1971 portfolio alongside photographers including Leonard Freed, William Gedney, Larry Fink, Les Krims, Philip Perkis, and Herbert Randall. That company helps place him within the broader history of serious American documentary and fine-art photography during the period.
📷 Photography & Social Responsibility
An intriguing entry in the historical record places D’Alessandro directly within debates about the photographer’s role in society. In September 1970, he participated in a New School for Social Research symposium titled Social Responsibility and the Photographer alongside Bruce Davidson, Michael Semak, and Richard Avedon.
The surviving archival record is revealing because photographers of the period were not merely asking how to make compelling images. They were also asking what obligations came with making them. Who gets photographed? How are people represented? Can a photograph shape public understanding? When does observation become exploitation, and what responsibility does the person behind the camera have toward the person standing in front of it?
D’Alessandro’s work fits naturally within those questions because his photographs repeatedly ask viewers to think about the relationship between representation and reality.
🔄 Returning to Glory
Decades after its creation, Glory continued to attract attention. Gitterman Gallery presented a major exhibition of D’Alessandro’s vintage photographs in New York in 2009, returning viewers to images created during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The distance in time inevitably changed the photographs. A picture made in 1970 records one historical moment, but a viewer encountering it decades later brings another moment to it. That is one of photography’s peculiar powers: the subject is frozen while the audience keeps changing.
Symbols change too. An American flag photographed in 1971 carries the history of 1971, but viewers inevitably bring everything that happened afterward into their interpretation. D’Alessandro’s decision not to dictate a single meaning allows the photographs to remain open to that process.
🧭 The American Road Without the Mythology
American photography has often romanticized travel through open highways, Western landscapes, roadside signs, and the promise of endless possibilities. D’Alessandro’s journey through the country is different because he notices what America has already placed beside the road.
People, institutions, commercial spaces, working neighborhoods, courthouses, signs, and flags fill his landscapes. His America is not an empty space waiting to be discovered. It is already inhabited, already organized, and already arguing with itself.
That makes the photographs feel closer to lived experience than to mythology. D’Alessandro’s American road is less about freedom from society than an encounter with the structures society has built.
👁️ Looking at Symbols Instead of Through Them
Familiar symbols can become nearly invisible because we know them too well. A flag hanging outside a building may become part of the background simply because we have seen the image so many times before.
D’Alessandro reverses that process. Once the viewer understands that every photograph in Glory contains the flag, it becomes impossible not to look for it. The familiar object becomes strange again, and that may be the project’s most important visual achievement.
The flag itself does not change, but its context continually changes what viewers think they are seeing. D’Alessandro teaches us to notice something we assumed we already understood.
✨ Robert D’Alessandro’s American Photographs
Robert D’Alessandro’s photographs do not offer a simple definition of America. Instead, they offer fragments: a man, a house, a courthouse, a neighborhood, a welfare office, a street, a shirt, and a flag. Each photograph contributes another piece, and no single piece can carry the entire meaning of the country.
That uncertainty is what makes Glory much more interesting than either a straightforward celebration or a condemnation of a national symbol. D’Alessandro understood that symbols become powerful partly because different people can see different things inside them, and his camera records those differences without pretending to settle them.
More than half a century after the photographs were made, the question at their center remains recognizable. The issue is not simply what the American flag means in the abstract, but what it means here, to this person, in this place, at this particular moment.
D’Alessandro kept finding different answers, and he left the final interpretation to the viewer.
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📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Smithsonian American Art Museum — Robert D’Alessandro
- Smithsonian Institution — The Christmas Bar
- Smithsonian Institution — Untitled (Women and City Theme)
- Gitterman Gallery — Robert D’Alessandro Biography
- Gitterman Gallery — Robert D’Alessandro Exhibition
- Gitterman Gallery — Robert D’Alessandro Works
- Library of Congress — Selected Photographers 1970 and 1971
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Selected Photographers, 1970 and 1971
