Gregory A. Carafelli: In The Making
Originally posted December 29, 2005. See above for further entries.
Note: Gregory hosted my website for many years before I recently moved it to another host. It's fitting, then, that the first post for this site at its new home is dedicated to him. Consider this an un-requested introduction to a book of his work not yet published.
Photograph by Gregory Carafelli.
It’s an odd way to look at the work of a photographer, but Flickr has made the tag cloud a new standard of analysis. Looking through the tags associated with Gregory’s work, I’m surprised to find a string of adjectives and nouns, but not a single verb.
Cemeteries, shipyards, empty lots and alleyways: the aesthetic project that Gregory is crafting cannot lay still. The broken, the sad, the empty or overgrown may be the things of Carafelli’s photography but the subject of his work is more simple and more revealing: process. Gregory’s attention is for things and people in the throe of it. Dare I say it that he doesn’t aim for beauty so much as truth. In capturing the process of things, beauty is a side effect and a bonus for the efforts. The real potential is in his ability to lay bare the true nature of things, to claim as beautiful that which may not otherwise be considered beautiful by giving us a glimpse of something in the making. In examining the coming together or falling apart of things Gregory searches for the encompassing truth of their existence. This is the infatuation with decay: that in its worn down state lays the concurrent potential for a skeletal understanding and an echo of glorious totality.
Seeking this truth in his images, Gregory’s work evokes the quiet emotion of the destroyed and deserted through careful reminders of human presence. Layered graffiti, shatter-proof glass put to the test, creeping greenery, and even jittering dusty light are all the traces of life (or its possibility) which remain in even the most forgotten site. These are not images of the broken and abandoned, but the just broken, just abandoned.
The shine of a factory in its last stages of rot, a lonesome match caught just after ignition, projects forgotten and abandoned. Gregory’s photographs frame soft and crumbling walls absent of human habitation as often as they do quiet tangles of conversation floating on a backdrop of smoke and film grain. It’s his concern for the doing of things that lets Gregory photograph raucous transvestites just as well as rotting breweries without presenting a schizophrenic body of work. When Gregory turns his camera to a human subject it is rarely for the typical task of a portrait-- finding the essential truth of a person or marking an event. Instead, his images of people assemble the quiet moments between here and there: decisions, hesitations, regret and desire. In the end it’s not the individuals that are the point and this is why I hesitate to call them portraits. Gregory refers to these people as The Young Thousands: the nameless-- sometimes faceless, the ones in the making. Here, as with his images devoid of human presence, the emotional terrain is always in motion.
It is my hope with this brief introduction to Carafelli’s work that the viewer comes to understand his photography as an aesthetic project rather than a collection of thematic images. If there’s one thing fitting a photographer who has devoted himself to exposing the process of things, it’s that Gregory’s project, in the end, is making the scene.
Photograph by Gregory Carafelli.