Mike Mellia’s series Another Day in Paradise is a lament for and celebration of both New York City and his father.
Mellia tells BuzzFeed: "This is a landscape of the Bronx, New York, where I grew up as a child and teenager, and the neighbourhood where my family still lives."
"Even though it is only 15 minutes north of Manhattan, this Italian-American neighbourhood is from a completely different era. I like the intersecting graphic lines of the telephone wires and the Christmas decorations mixed in. The tranquility and beauty is very unsettling to me when juxtaposed against the urbanity of the neighborhood."
Mike Mellia / Via mikemellia.com
"My father used to take my brother and myself to all of these great American diners around Manhattan and the Bronx."
"He would tell us about drinking 'malteds', old-fashioned malted milk ice cream shakes that he used to buy as a kid. I think these diners are loved by an entire generation of New Yorkers because they remind them of their own childhoods in an era long gone. After he passed away I started going to all these diners and other places to start photographing them and rediscovering the beauty in all of them."
Mike Mellia / Via mikemellia.com
"My father played jazz saxophone, and loved collecting vinyl records of great jazz musicians from the 1950s and 1960s."
"When he was a kid, for ten cents he would ride the subway from the Bronx to manhattan and check out all the record stores downtown. Caravan is a jazz record by the great jazz drummer Art Blakey and his band the Jazz Messengers. This image is a reference to a time, over half a century ago, when New York City was the cultural mecca of the entire world for jazz musicians, artists, poets, and writers, who fearlessly reinvented the avant-garde and set the foundation for culture today."
Mike Mellia / Via mikemellia.com
"Like most people, I have many childhood memories of riding bicycles, and my father kept this aspect of the American dream with him his whole life."
"This scene can have many different interpretations but to me the bicycle is symbolic of when New York City still had a small-town community feeling. The mysterious figure looking on from the shadows while the bicycle melts in an inferno might represent a loss of innocence."
Mike Mellia / Via mikemellia.com
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