Time Out
Books
Feb17-24 2000
Photographer Rita Barros pays homage to that hotbed of bohemian culture in Fifteen Years: Chelsea Hotel (Câmara Municipal de Lisboa/Cultura). Barros book includes photos of past and current residents such as Gregory Corso, Deedee Ramone and Virgil Thomson. And since Barros herself is a longtime resident she knows whereof she shoots.

Vogue Casa
Lar Dolce Lar
… in the years that she has inhabited this mosaic ambience, Portuguese photographer, Rita Barros, has documented the Chelsea with images that don’t censor or chronicle, but create with its intimate complicity a dialogue with her own identity and personal expression. It is about this daily live that she will show in her book, Woody Allen filming, Courtney Love in a fashion shoot, rocker Bon Jovi, writer Arthur Miller, and many more. The daily diversity of the hotel is for her the best microscopic example of the city: "New York has such an energy, such craziness that eccentricity is trivialized".
By Rita Martins

TV Guide
Retratos de Hotel
Jan 2000
Rita Barros is a photographer who lives in New York since 1980 and brought to the Galeria 111 an exhibition with the title Fifteen Years: Chelsea Hotel. Personalities from the art world, "sacred monsters" of the xx century culture are part of the gallery of personalities that passed through the Chelsea and that Rita Barros captured with her camera. It’s the art of photography in all its splendor. Not to be missed

Expresso
Dec 4, 99
A mythical and mediatic place, the Chelsea Hotel in New York,, is a survivor of times when the underground did not coincide with the surface, more or less mundane of the present. Created in 1905, people like Mark Twain O’Henry, Bette Davies, Pollock, Nabokov, Tennessee Williams stayed there. Rita Barros who lives in the room where Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001 has been photographing it for the past 15 years and gathered the portraits of her neighbors and personal memories in an exhibition and book. Bon Jovi, Courtney Love, Arthur Miller in black and white, and in color Henry Geldzhaler, Barry Flanagan, Gregory Corso, James Brown, Jean Baudrillard, Don Cherry and many others. It is a document.
Alexandre Pomar

A Capital
Room with a view over the city
22-28 December 99
…about the work, Gerard Schreiner an art historian wrote" Rita Barros guides us through the Chelsea theater of solitude, haunted with reveries, emotional ambiguities, fragments of self, hidden desires and emotions, shadows from lost worlds and all powerful semi-alive beings which tend to dissolve into a new dimension: the New York dimension.
Proof of this are the photos of rocker Jon Bon Jovi, German singer
Shizo, philosopher Jean Baudrillard, painter Richard Bernstein, singer/actress Courtney Love, rocker Deedee Ramone, painter Blair Wair or the fashion editor Gene Krell. And to this mix, the house staff; is added, from the telephone operator to the receptionist.
The images live through the complicity with the sitter. The humor, irreverence, the comfort and tranquility come from personal objects and small individual universes of the different personalities that inhabit the hotel.
Vera Ferreira

From Amazon.com
On the cusp of significance., August 27, 2000
Reviewer: laurencefrommer from New York City

Photographer, journalist, artist, and Portuguese expatriate Rita Barros, is one of those lucky people who arrives on the scene when a world is in transition and captures dynamic change for posterity. This book is really about each souls struggle for significance. Here we see a paradox: The Chelsea Hotel, when it was a rag tag hangout in a dusty backwater, at least had it's scruffy but brilliant artists. Now that the surrounding neighborhood has become a high rent,trendy district, the Hotel is mostly the home of brilliantly(i.e.expensivly) dressed, hangers on.

In this Book, you will witness worn but wistful folks such as composer Virgil Thomson(in his last years) and a few surviving beat writers waving ,(or is it wavering?) as new talent arrives followed by new money. Noble souls such as Helen Johnson (owner of one of the finest African American Theater collections) are finally given their overdue due, while truly lesser folks do overdo it, flailing to be noticed for talent that they probably don't really have.

The luckiest readers will be those who are drawn onto the creaking boards of the Old Chelsea lured by the likes of rock star Dee Dee Ramone, only to meet film genius, Shirley Clarke for the first time (or vice-versa.)This book is clearly a labor of love. With this un-selfconcious enterprise, Ms. Barros has ended up offering something truly of value. The reading public is the sore looser if they don't take notice!

From Amazon.com
Postcards from a cruise on the "Ship of Fools", August 9, 2000
Reviewer: jleao from Cambridge, MA USA

The Chelsea Hotel remains a fixed point in the chaotic map of New York's creative overworld. It is a collection of brief moments which superimpose "has-been's" with "will-be's", names, facts and faces flashing in and out of notoriety. Somewhere in the building there are holes that lead not exactly into John Malkovitch head but surely into those of likes of Greg Corso, Arthur C. Clark, Sid Vicious, Leonard Cohen among many others. Some holes lead directly to some ugly swamp in New Jersey, so you need a tour guide. Rita Barros is the best you can get. She has wistfully cohabited with this unending cast of characters for those many years; she has become one of them; she has probed the holes in those walls for a decade and a half; inhabited the minds they lead to. She has captured them in the butterfly net which is her camera, she has pined them into postcards, complete with the rooms they refashioned in their own image. She now mails them from beyond the edge in this picture book of quirkiness which is bound to turn any coffee table upside down. To observe that her photos are vivid, vibrant, vicarious, or exuberant, eccentric, hilarious (which they all are) is to realize that, while browsing these pages, one trips on an unending treasure trove of adjectives which never cease to suggest themselves. More than anything these images show the affection and respect for its subjects which are the distinguishing marks of great photography. Having this book around is like joining a new group of old friends or waking with a sudden urge to paint your living room. Get it before it’s gone!