Easy Rider Magazine

Ray Carofano is looking at an image he’s titled “Broken Palms.” It’s on the postcard that announces Terrene, his one-man show of large-scale photographic prints that opens tonight at the Warschaw Gallery in San Pedro.
“You can see that these three palm trees are in serious trouble,” he says. “One is totally bent over here on the right, the middle one almost looks like it has a broken neck, and that one on the left is not going straight up, but leaning out to the left.
“A lot of my landscape work has dealt with burnt, dying, or dead material. The reason for that is I’ve always been interested in the life cycle. Because everything evolves from the earth it also returns to the earth, whether it’s humans or plant life; even a structure will eventually deteriorate and end up into nothing but dust, and goes back to the earth.”
Well, this one’s a pretty bleak image, I remark.
“Most of my landscape images do have that feeling to them,” Carofano replies. “The whole series on the Mojave Desert – every image has this feeling of desolation, deserted homes, loneliness. The way I positioned the structure or dwelling [makes it appear] relatively small in this huge environment of nothing.”
And the silence. We wouldn’t be hearing city noises or cars driving past if we were standing inside Carofano’s photographs. I mention the Surrealist painters Paul Delvaux and Giorgio de Chirico.
“There’s always that loneliness and feeling from [Edward] Hopper,” Carofano says, “that has that same kind of feel.”
You seem to focus on the end of the cycle as opposed to the beginning.
“True. At least I have for probably the last eight to ten years.”
Which can make for visually appealing work, since things in a dilapidated state have more to offer up for the eye than something fresh and unblemished. I then indicate a statuesque form behind him. Such as that sculpture of Ron Pippen’s over there, made up of old, discarded elements.
“Exactly,” Carofano says, but points out that he’s been re-directing his focus:
“The new work is almost going back to the beginning of the cycle. When you see some of these images in the show [Terrene reprises the exhibition of the same name seen earlier this year at the Couturier Gallery in L.A.], they are more pure landscape that is not yet dealing with the decay. It just seems I went so long just showing the decay that I’ve decided to go to another part of the cycle.”
A creepy feeling
Ray Carofano grew up an only child in North Mount Caramel, a fairly rural area north of New Haven in Connecticut.
As a young boy, he says, “I experienced periods of loneliness because there weren’t other kids to play with because I had no brothers or sisters. I would have to use my imagination to make up things to keep myself occupied.” And since he lived near a forest, “I would explore the woods. I would build little forts out of branches…
“And then there was an experience I had. I was maybe six years old, and I was walking in the woods. There was a foundation of stone, just half of a foundation, from a house God knows how old. It could have been 1700s. It was getting dark, and somehow I lost my sense of direction.
“This place, even in full daylight, had this mysterious air to it. That feeling I got from it left an impression on me of mystery, solitude, scariness.” Carofano pauses. “For some reason it’s never left me. It’s not like I think about it and have nightmares or anything like that, but when I’m looking through the camera I try to isolate certain subject matter that gives me that feeling, that brings me back to that. In other words, if I can capture what I’m feeling I think the viewer, somebody who views that particular image, will get an emotional response from it.
“Photography obviously starts with the eyes, and it starts with vision, seeing,” Carofano adds; “but it isn’t just about seeing. It also has to deal with instincts and feelings that you have… Why I photograph what I photograph deals with everything that I’ve experienced from [childhood] all the way to the present time. And we still have new experiences – and things keep changing the way I see and the way I think.”
From 0 to 60
“I don’t photograph on a regular basis,” Carofano explains. “There’s painters that will spend x-number of hours each week or whatever it is, and those two days they’ll paint. I don’t work that way; there can be months that will go by that I don’t pick up a camera unless I have to do something small commercially. But it’ll start festering in me; it’s like somebody turned a switch on in my mind and visually I start to become more aware of what’s around me. When that starts to happen, then I start thinking, Okay, this is time, maybe for a road trip with the cameras, or, if it’s here, maybe I want to continue with the Faces of San Pedro [an open-ended series begun in 1998]. You just get to this point where all your visual senses are very heightened. So, maybe I photograph for two weeks, or take two weekend trips, and that’s it. Then it’s the darkroom. I mean, for every hour behind the camera, probably it relates to 10, 12 hours in the darkroom if not more.
“But there’s something that I’ve noticed, and that is when something trips my senses – when I’m out with cameras in hand looking for a subject, when I come across something – it’s important for me to photograph it quickly, because there’s a certain heightened sense, emotional feeling that I get: You’re walking through a forest or down a street in San Pedro and you see something that immediately triggers [a response], you want to photograph it. If I spend too much time thinking about it and get too technical on it, setting up tripods, taking readings, I’ll lose the sense, that emotional feeling I had, and then it doesn’t come through in the photograph.
“The funny this is,” Carofano adds, “I’ll see something – maybe it’s a landscape, maybe it’s an unusual-looking tree, a burnt tree – and I’ll photograph it. And then I say to myself, Okay, that’s good, I got that image. But that can’t be just it, there’s gotta be another angle: let me walk around this, get down low, knee-high, look at it. Maybe I’ll take several other exposures. And I’ve noticed that nine times out of ten the image that I end up printing is the first one I’ve taken.
“You would think that wouldn’t be the case, because I just walk right into a scene and look through the camera. I might make some slight adjustments – and then ‘click.’” He pauses. “So, again there’s that immediate intuitiveness, an emotional feeling that I need to capture quickly or else it somehow get diluted.”
If you’re batting, I say, and you think too hard about the pitch that’s coming instead of relying on your natural instinct, the ball will sail right past you.
“That’s right,” Carofano replies. “Somebody said, If you’re dancing and you think too much about what you’re doing with your feet, you usually end up tripping.”
And not with Dick Dale, either.
“I’ve been photographing so many years now, it’s almost like breathing; I don’t have to spend a lot of time analyzing what lens I might want to put on the camera… I just do it; it just happens.”
Light in the darkroom
About all that time Carofano says he spends in the darkroom:
“It’s processing the film,” he says, “it’s making the proof sheets, it’s studying the proofs, selecting which images that you want to go on with; and then it’s the printing stage, the toning, the staining of the images, and if you’re going to present them, then it’s the presentation.”
In Carofano’s personal statement, he has this to say about his darkroom work: “All of my prints are silver gelatin. I hand-manipulate them in selective areas during the exposure of the photographic paper. I then split-tone the prints, using sepia and selenium, furthering the transformation of my work. Much of my personal expression goes into the printing stage. I, therefore, regard the work in the darkroom as more creative than technical.”
In your case, I say, the creative process is two-fold – intuitively discovering the composition you want and also what you do with it in the darkroom.
Carofano acknowledges this. “The technique that I do in the darkroom is something that I found by just experimentation. It all came about [when] I wanted to soften an image. It was actually a portrait of a middle-aged woman and I wanted to make it softer because it was under a harsh light.” He goes on to explain how he achieves those bleeding blacks (a signature trait, actually) and that kind of foggy look. “When I applied it to some of the landscape work I did,” he says of the process, “it heightened the mysteriousness of the image, which I had originally felt anyway.”
It also captured that sense of solitude and fright that Carofano had felt in the woods many years before.
Some of the prints, with their sweeping soft browns, are reminiscent of the Pictorialists, popular a century ago (William E. Dassonville, Karl Struss, for example), but also of the earliest photographic plates by the likes of Gustave Le Gray and, before him, the daguerreotypes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey. In so much of Carofano’s work there is a disquieting sense of being at the edge of time rather than somewhere inside it, and a feeling that most of his subjects – trees, people, human constructions – are actively receding from us, actively deteriorating. Meanwhile, the images stop us in our tracks.
Photographer Gil Mares, who also lives in San Pedro and has been pointing his camera at ships in the harbor, tells me he has admired Carofano’s work for a long time: “Carofano can find the exceedingly ordinary around us and transmute it to the exceedingly extraordinary with his unique vision and mastery as a printer.”
“I can teach you how to print like I do,” Carofano says; “I’ve done it in workshops.” He then mentions Michael Cannon, whose photographs are on the walls surrounding us, the recipient of a one-man show in Carofano’s Gallery 478. “There’s similarities, obviously, if you look at his work and my work. Well, Michael is a student of mine. I showed him how to print this way and how to do the toning.
“But I can’t tell him how to see; he does his own seeing, he has his own vision. That’s what makes it different. People say to me, Aren’t you afraid? You teach all these people how to print. Don’t you think all their work will look like yours? Of course it won’t look like mine. I have a different mind, I have different vision. You can take five people and put them all in the same spot, and aim out at the same subject matter at the shoot, and everything will look different.
“We all interpret subject matter differently,” Carofano emphasizes. “All the incoming information, what we do with it, we all have different computers up here.” He laughs. “Different software.” Then he pauses, perhaps wondering if he should push this amusing analogy one final time: “No two people are running on the same program these days.”
One hand washes the other
There’s your commercial photography and then there’s the work you do for yourself, I say. They both involve strict attention to detail, but at some point there’s a bit of a difference; that is, in your own work you can proceed as you will.
“Absolutely,” Carofano replies. “You have to realize that when you’re working commercially you are photographing what someone else wants you to photograph. Of course you do pay attention to detail, to lighting and so forth, and you try to make this particular object you’re photographing as wonderful as you possibly can. On the other hand, the personal work is exactly what it is, it’s personal work; it comes from me. I get to pick and select the subject matter, which is close to me, which is part of me, which again goes back to my whole lifetime of experiences.
“It’s certainly different. The only real thing it has in common is that you’re using the same tools, in other words cameras… One basically takes care of finances, lets, say, and the other takes care of a much deeper meaning. It feeds my soul.
“When I talk to students – and that’s one of the things a lot of the colleges want me to talk about because they are teaching commercial work – I talk about how you can combine the two and how important it is for an artist, all artists for that matter, to find time for that. With a photographer it’s extremely important, otherwise if you’re just doing commercial work all the time you can dry up, you can be burned out. What keeps even the commercial end fresh is being able to do personal work.”
Sometimes you can learn something from the one that you can apply to the other.
“This is true.”
From there to here
Ray Carofano moved to California in 1967. He describes the circular route that he and his first wife followed, which led them down into Mexico, up through San Diego and into Santa Barbara (nice place, no work), and finally to Manhattan Beach where they found a place close to the water for about a hundred bucks a month. They also lived in Torrance and in Redondo Beach, just south of the pier. Carofano worked at Riviera Camera, and was featured in a two-man show (with painter Eric Vollrath) at the Tanega/Maher Gallery on Avenida del Norte. Easy Reader even ran a short piece abut the show (unsigned, but I suspect Thomas Pynchon) in its March 11, 1976 edition.
How did you find this building and end up here?
“I’d known about [San Pedro] for a long time, but never really thought about moving there, and then Ron Pippen, who I had met at a gallery up in El Segundo, invited me down here. I started to realize that there really was an arts scene going on, and there were several good artists living here.”
Until then, Carofano had always maintained a home and a darkroom in two separate locations. However, he and his second wife, Arnee, whom he married in 1994, had been considering the idea of finding a loft that would double as both living space and studio. Carofano, particularly, relished the thought of having everything under one roof.
“Anyway, we started looking down here for a place to rent,” he says, and as it turned out the space they were going to lease ended up being the one they purchased in 1997. “It was an old Crocker Bank,” Carofano continues, “and we just kept pulling stuff out, demo-ing two ceilings, built this on, and here we are… It took about six months of work to be done on the building before we occupied it.” They secured an artist-in-residency permit and were off and running.
“Shortly after that, no more than about a year later, probably in ’98 or ’99, they started the First Thursday Art Walk here, and we decided we would become a part of it, maybe on a small level at that point. And it just grew. We started the gallery [Gallery 478], and as time went on we started putting up more shows.”
Carofano mentions that he and Arnee have tried to adhere to certain artistic standards: “As you know, you can call yourself a gallery but some of the work in some of the galleries – whether it’s been here or anywhere else – can be pretty bleak. It’s more arts and crafts. And so we’ve tried to keep this on a fine arts level.”
That’s true. Eventually, anyone with a serious interest in the arts (from Chuck Meyers and Dora Perez, the Torrance Bookends, to Random Length’s James Allen and Suzanne Matsumiya) will find their way into Gallery 478 (at 478 Seventh St.). They’ll also find interesting people to talk with (e.g., the four just mentioned), and sooner or later a band sets up and starts to play.
Most of us take it for granted, but preparing for each First Thursday takes plenty of work, and is a big investment in time and money. It would be hard to imagine Carofano being able to pull it off on his own.
Arnee Carofano was a TWA flight attendant for 23 years, so chances are she has a wealth of experience in keeping people happy and comfortable, while ensuring that everything runs like clockwork. Her husband doesn’t mince words: “Arnee is extremely important in my life; she’s the love of my life and a real driving force behind me.
“There was a point in my life,” he continues, “with raising two children and having a really heavy schedule doing commercial work, that I did very little personal work – that’s one of the reasons why, when I lecture, I tell people how important it is to maintain some time for personal work.” When Carofano first showed Arnee some of his own photographs she was astonished. Her response made him realize he’d been neglecting his real passion. “Arnee said, You should continue. You should be doing this work.”
And Ray Carofano listened.
At home and abroad
If you go to carofano.com you’ll notice that the photographer has work in several categories, from Architectural Abstracts and Faces of San Pedro to High Tension and Observations. Each series, separately and together, reveals Carofano’s versatility. High Tention shows high tension wires and the scaffold-like towers they connect, but the contrast between these fabricated objects and the clouds or landscape behind them may also give rise to thoughts about the “high tension” between Man and Nature. Faces of San Pedro, on the other hand, captures – and dignifies, really – many of the local residents who, at least in large part, might otherwise remain invisible or marginalized as the city inevitably gentrifies, perhaps to lose its low-key character and working class sensibility.
Do you sometimes see an old building in the area and think, Well, I know this one’s not going to be here much longer, and take pictures of it?
“You know,” Carofano says, “I’m more aware of it lately. I did photograph Beacon Street, not extensively, when they were tearing it down, but I do have images.” He acknowledges the historical value of such images. “This town is ready to explode; we’re seeing it already with several large condo/loft-styled buildings going up. Sixth Street and Seventh Street, in this old town section of San Pedro, might not look anything like it does now in ten or fifteen years.
“There’s many people here, including myself, who would rather see it remain the way it is, but as we all know, history has shown that you can fight – maybe slow it down – but in the end the developers somehow get their way.”
You must go through periods when a certain series, or a certain subject, has more interest to you than at other times. Is there a focus or theme to the new show, where a certain series dominates?
“This is mostly landscape,” Carofano says. “Terrene deals with the earth; there’s a couple [of images] where you’ll see the presence of man – maybe a telephone pole, some kind of trestle, bridge – that comes into the landscape. But, you’re right, my interest changes. I’m probably in a transitional period right now as far as subject matter goes, and what I’m going to be doing in the future.”
Two years ago, Carofano had a high-profile show at El Camino College, curated by Susanna Meiers. It was called Ray Carofano/Ten Years, and contained just what it says. Carofano has also exhibited up and down the coast, as well as Texas, central Mexico, and Cuba.
He and Arnee have traveled – Europe a couple of times, Cuba a couple of times, and Mexico a lot, but my impression is that Carofano does not take a great deal of pictures (unlike most of us) when he’s out of the country.
“For some people it works,” he says, “some people their eyes pop out. It’ll work for me if I’m there a while and I get comfortable, but it’s more of a state of mind than it is anything else. You can’t just say, Well, let’s go to France next year or Let’s go to South America next year [and photograph]. You have to get your mind ready for it. I call it, The eyes are turned on. It’s like a switch.
“It doesn’t last that long for me. If you can go two weeks, or a week or two, that’s really good. I mean, you’d almost burn out anyway. Everything I’m looking at, I analyze, and I’m just visually flying.” He chuckles at the thought.
“I believe that the everyday is an important source of everything interesting in art, and that one can find everything in the everyday, in the commonplace. In other words, you don’t really have to travel to exotic places to find subject matter.”
Curator Ron Linden, who’s been spending the last few days taking down one show (a compelling exhibit by Susan Jacobs) and putting up Terrene, waxes rhapsodic about Carofano’s work and technique, and not just because the two have known each other for several years and have their respective galleries within catapult-range of one another. He points out that some of the work is pastoral, reminiscent of Monet, and that the images seem to reference the whole history of landscape.
Linden also sees them as part of a Romantic tradition, and although I haven’t heard anyone else use the term Romantic in speaking about them, the landscapes are clearly evocative – remember what Carofano said about mysteriousness? – in a moody, at times unsettling manner. This isn’t the classical, heroic age of Jacques-Louis David, that’s for sure. Isolation as well as integration, Linden says. He clearly knows the work well, and believes wholeheartedly in the talents of the man behind it. Ray Carofano has spent the better part of a lifetime perfecting his art and, as Linden makes clear, each print offers more, not less, the longer we look at it. When you’ve got a body of work that can do that, you know you’re on to something special.
Terrene: Large-Scale Prints opens tonight at the Warschaw Gallery, located in the Pacific Warner Building at 600 South Pacific Ave., San Pedro. There’s an artist’s reception from 4 to 7 p.m. this Saturday. Normal gallery hours, Monday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday from 11 to 5 p.m., or by appointment. Through July 29. Call (310) 832-5115.