Larry Racioppo was born and raised in South Brooklyn, and has been photographing throughout New York City since 1971. A former VISTA Volunteer, and participant in NYC's Cultural Council Foundation's CETA Artists Project, Racioppo had his first solo exhibit in 1977 at Brooklyn's f-stop Gallery. His first book of photographs, Halloween, was published by Scribners in 1980.

From 1989-2011, Larry was the official photographer for NYC's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, hired to document the city's rebuilding of distressed neighborhoods, including Bedford Stuyvesant, Harlem and the South Bronx. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 1997, Racioppo took a leave from HPD to work on a series of personal projects, including FORGOTTEN GATEWAY, the Abandoned Buildings of Ellis Island, a travelling exhibit of his photographs that originated at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

In 2006 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Chairman's Extraordinary Action Grant for his exhibit The Word on the Street at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. Racioppo's photographs are in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, El Museo del Barrio, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. His second book, Brooklyn Before: Photographs, 1971–1983 was published by Cornell University Press in 2018.