Shot exclusively in the pre-gentrified blocks, fields and buildings of the Lower East Side, the family photographed here occupied a multigenerational tenement house on Stanton Street, and their story is told through a protagonist named Glendalis. Cappetta was raised within a similar family system, surrounded by an ever-present cast of relatives and friends, and like her subject she was the youngest child; the work is informed by those beginnings and reads as a search for her own girlhood as much as for the larger themes of family and community, and for the way relationships transform along with us over time. In spite of the apparently beatific family narrative, crime, incarceration, gangs and death are part of the culture of certain neighbourhoods and no family is immune to their trauma; clues to that reality are hidden in the pictures.