Catching up with Harrington Park area professional photographer Mel DiGiacomo

HARRINGTON PARK, N.J. — You see him everywhere. Outside his cozy home on Norma Road. Inside his overcrowded studio in downtown Harrington Park. At town fields, parks, tennis courts, school grounds. At weddings, Gaelic football and rugby matches, civic functions ranging from ceremonial to “wetdowns.”

With trusty camera in hand, Melchior DiGiacomo has been HP’s photographic Everyman for 42 years. His memorable black-and-white pictures can move you from cheers to tears, from raw to awe, from classic to closeup. As always, you are left with the quiet notion: how does he do it? How does he get it right so often?

Forget that his corner studio is so crammed that even a back room defies description. Just gaze on the wall at his powerful 1980 black-and-white shot of two innocent youths diving into the Hudson River off Jersey City piers with the two World Trade Center buildings looming large in the background decades before they would be destroyed by terrorists.

Talking to Mel about his life and craft is like taking an international journey in English, Italian and Yiddish. Which explains why Mel has been almost everywhere – to Russia 10 times, China, every Western capital, even Uzbekistan (yes, he knows the capital). His touching photos from Antigua define the beauty of that picturesque Caribbean island (which he has visited dozens of times), and his tribal nickname there, Tumperbee, became the title of a 2010 photo book.

But Harrington Park remains special, “like living in a small town in Vermont except we don’t have those snows,” he says. And when the HP School is in session and Mel is standing outside his playhouse or seated at his computer, he can hardly wait for the 3 o’clock joyous “noise” that brings overactive boys and girls from school to downtown, endearingly “yelling at each other” in playful packs.

“Harrington Park attracts a certain type of people,” he says, “that want a small house, they want trees, grass. swim clubs, the fields, the basketball courts.”

It is a far cry from the young Hudson County adventurer who spent a year in England five decades ago before landing a job as an usher at CBS and taking actor Van Johnson’s personal advice that “you do not whistle in the dressing rooms because actors are a superstitious breed.”

The photography began with 10 years of New York Ranger hockey wrapped around a treasured piece of advice from a camera colleague: “the colors of photography are black and white.”

Mel’s tennis initiation began in 1971 at the U.S. Open where the likes of Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Rosie Casals, Virginia Wade and others awakened another sensitivity. Martina Navratilova even grew so attached she flew him to her Florida home to capture her real self away from serve-and-volley theatrics.

And Mel gets it whether it is capturing Andre Agassi, at age 4 racquet in hand, with his father and sister in Las Vegas, or the mature Andre Agassi with John McEnroe at a later U.S. Open.

“I was always into everything,” he says, “I just didn’t know you could translate
that into photography.”

His passions, Mel says, can sometimes drive friends crazy not to mention his wife Diana, or his two tennis-playing children, Anthony, a California film producer, and Domenica (Nikki), a New Jersey attorney.

Even Diana’s initial meeting with Mel is storybook. They were standing in an alphabetized line at an American Express outlet in London when Mel, of course, struck up a conversation. That was 1970. Next June, the pair will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

“His sense of humanity,” Diana says, confident that her extensive clinical psychology background qualifies as a people evaluator. “Being able to find each subject. He can go in anywhere and pull out the essence in a unique way. You feel connected to people and he’s quite amazing that way.”

Brook Zelcer, an English instructor at NVOT, wrote the texts for Mel’s captivating photos in their illuminating coffee-table tennis book, Existential Tennis. Says Zelcer, “Mel wants those authentic, intimate moments that go unnoticed in all the buzz about high-speed rallies and spin rates. And he wants juxtapositions, inversions, seeming coincidences, reflections. He looks for that. And always for moments of stillness, of peace in the middle of the storm. Ultimately, it’s stuff that only he can find because he is the only one looking.”

The recognition has come. Mel was inducted into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame. He was even inducted into the Cliffside Park High School Athletic Hall of Fame even though he did not graduate from the school or play sports there. His photos have been shown in major museums and even the British House of Commons.

Ken Horowitz, a Harrington Park resident for 33 years, has been into photography since high school, owned a photo lab in Manhattan and has been a long-time Mel observer and friend, respect that has grown, personally and professionally, over decades.

“He’s a character, part of the town,” says Horowitz, who can sometimes be spotted inside the studio exchanging vibes. “He became part of the town by documenting everything in town. Everybody knows Mel. He’s indefensible.”

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