Larry Racioppo was born and raised in South Brooklyn. After two years as a VISTA volunteer in California, he returned home in December 1970 intending to become a photographer. Racioppo photographed his neighborhood, working in black-and-white 35mm and later in 120mm film, and had his first solo exhibition in 1977 at Brooklyn's f-stop gallery. In 1980, Scribner's published his first book of photographs, Halloween . In 1989, Racioppo became the official photographer for New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, hired to document the city's rebuilding of its distressed neighborhoods, from Bedford Stuyvesant to Harlem to the South Bronx. He coordinated Landscapes of Hope , an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York documenting the agency's work. In 1997, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography and created a series of panoramic urban landscapes. While continuing to photograph for HPD until 2011, Racioppo had solo exhibits of two in-depth personal projects: Forgotten Gateway: T he Abandoned Buildings of Ellis Island at the National Building Museum and The Word on the Street at the Museum of Biblical Art.

Racioppo has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the Graham Foundation. In 2006, he received 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 work is in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, The Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Public Library, El Museo del Barrio, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.