Photographer Larry Racioppo loves his native Brooklyn and has made it his life’s work for nearly 50 years to document the borough’s transforming neighborhoods as well as his family and friends who have called it home. His latest book, Brooklyn Before, Photographs 1971—1983, was released earlier this year and illustrates a very different, pre-gentrification South Brooklyn filled with colorful characters and tight-knit communities.

“In Brooklyn Before, Racioppo lets us see the vitality of his native Brooklyn, stretching from historic Park Slope to the beginnings of Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park,” according to Cornell University Press, publisher of Brooklyn Before. Racioppo’s 128 black-and-white photographs show “the intimacy and roughness of life in a working-class community of Irish American, Italian American, and Puerto Rican families…with honesty and insight.”