It’s like having a front row seat to the best party in town.
Photographer Scott Laperruque puts you right in the middle of the New York City Greenwich Village Halloween Parade from 1982 through 1986 with his fantastically rich book, “Treaters”.
Laperruque lived on the parade route on West 10th Street in the early 1980’s, enabling him to give the reader a glimpse of the extravaganza when it was in a sort of an adolescent period – much larger than it’s humble beginnings of fewer than 200 participating local children and artists, but much smaller than the spectacle it is today (the most recent parade, which took place yesterday, did so because the organizers were able to raise $50K to make it possible). The parade has since outgrown such side streets and sticks to the Avenue.
Most of the photos in this new offering are black and white, but many are black and white prints that have been painstakingly hand colored, turning them into images both evocative and surreal. The images walk you through the village streets with all sorts of interesting monsters: Grocho Marks nuns, a lifesize Pacman a bunch of naughty cross dressing flight attendants and a framed Mona Lisa…with a beard. This is surely not Halloween in the suburbs.
The book is 138 pages and contains 113 photos in all. Lapperuque also gives the reader some written history about the parade, as well as some background info on the processes and techniques used to achieve these images. But the stars of this show are the images–and the people–themselves.
Treaters is available via Blurb for $79 (with 50% of the profits donated to the parade.)