April 30, 2004

Changing Face of San Pedro—
Not Looking Away
Ray Carofano’s Influential Gaze
By Taso Papadakis

     By some estimates there has been three different generations of artist pioneers who have attempted to colonize old San Pedro, starting after WWII with the original Exodus Gallery on Sixth Street. Yet the boom-and-bust economy always seems to stop any permanent loft settlement, except for a tenacious few. Now, once again, artists have rediscovered the streets of Pedro and are creating a value beyond the real estate to the old downtown that has fallen on hard times. 
     After  really  looking  at Ray Carofano’s series, Faces of Pedro, several questions remain.  Why does such an obviously talented photographer choose to shoot formal portraits of San Pedro’s street people like they are some fallen celebrities? What prompts some of his subjects to seek him out in the fallen hours of the night and beg that he take their picture? The answer to these and deeper questions can be found not just in his stunning portraits but also in his mysterious landscapes that seem to have been taken out of time and distilled. 
     Other great photographers have connected with the humanity of the marginalized—Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Sebastião Salgado spring readily to mind.  But unlike them (and even himself as young man, traveling to Manhattan to shoot winos and homeless people in the Bowery) Carofano doesn’t have to go looking for his subjects. All he has to do is not look away. 
     “I do not work well in exotic locations,” he says simply. “I have found everything I needed out my front door,”  right here in San Pedro. There is a certain reality about this place and the people that draws Carofano as well as other artists to live and work here. They like it because this is not the Westside, it is not chic, this is not Laguna Beach. 
     In his Faces series, there is the “Yellow Man,” a homeless photographer, who used to roam Pacific Avenue (searching for the hue which gave him his name) and “Stephanie” a prostitute and professional drinker who showed up at Carofano’s front door begging him to take her picture at 2 a.m. So he did. The result is blatantly sensual and elicits an ambiguous reaction of attraction and pity. There is “Montana,” a drinker and cowboy with a face like a 200-year old Indian and eyes like a royal, golden child’s. There is “David,” the medicated and gentle schizophrenic from Jacksonville trying to unstiffen his neck while Carofano snapped him in his helplessness. These faces make up a kind of human landscape of hope and fear. 
     “All of these images were taken in my studio using artificial light,” he explains. “Most of the sessions were very late at night sometimes two or three after the bars had closed. I think the fact that my subjects and I had a few drinks made for more casual shooting.” The session might have been casual but the results are a dramatic and theatrical expression of beauty. He has brought them out of the bar and individualizes them almost like a talent agent would a child actor. 
     “He lit them like Hurrell lit a starlet,” explained Susanna Meiers, curator of the El Camino College Center for the Arts, who has just played host to a ten-year retrospective of Carofano’s photographs, including some of the Faces series. “It makes me wonder what happened to these people. I question the photos.” The results are anything but didactic. “I do not think that Carofano’s work is meant to carry a social impact or message, maybe peripherally, yes, maybe. I think he is an incredible photographer.” 
     The absence of a didactic message makes their impact even harder to internalize: they are simply what one sees everyday. It is what sickens many residents and business owners about the area, it is what Carofano forces you to look at and redefine. They look like children in their eyes. He understands what makes human beings insolent and beautiful. He has given them an opportunity to share who they are, past their addictions and sickness, the differences that divide.  With cancer victim “Donna”—the struggle from her nature yearns to come through her failing motor skills and disintegrating features. Her condition is a microcosm that is truly heart-breaking and depressingly vulgar. He takes photographs of the paradox.  
      “I am not that interested in making a social statement…in other words, I don’t consciously plan to do so,” Carofano explains. “I am more interested in emotional expression. This doesn’t mean that the work does not have a social impact. It seemed to make a change with people I’ve photographed in the sense that they might not have been aware of their self worth but afterwards perhaps felt better.” 
     They are not so far removed from Carofano himself, or the successful building contractor insulated by his family and an insurance policy, living above Western Avenue. This awareness of inner dignity—even among the beaten-down—along with his technical skill, his eye, emotional courage and jovial spirit is heavily influencing the work in this town and city.  
     “I used to take pictures of my friends riding their motorbikes on dirt highways.” Carofano grew up in North Mount Caramel, Connecticut, “I would get bored of that and wander into the woods, I remember the shadows of the trees. It was a mystery to me. I was an only child.”  
     He has been photographing since he was twelve. He was drawn to the woods and has, essentially, stayed there in his heart. He tends to dwell in that specific memory of his childhood. His landscape work reaches to attain that sensation and the Faces series retains elements of it.  For some, it is a first kiss or a mother’s expression, for Carofano it was the limbs of the New England backcountry. “I remember this moment where I was in the forest and it was dramatic and it was all shadow and gave me a certain feeling which has stayed with me.”  His sense of wonder pierces viewers with a unique strain of ecstatic melancholia. His print-tones are a reflective, honey-vapored lament on loss. Destruction. Memory. Hope. 
      “When a group of Gypsies took over a state park near my home, I befriended a young boy about my age. He told me how they lived, traveling all the time. I found that very exciting, I wanted to be like him.” 
     He packed up a Jaguar, an inheritance gift from his first wife’s family, and with her bravely bouncing along, drove West like any valiant hippie pioneer, landing first in Santa Barbara, then in Manhattan Beach, where he became interested in the possibility of making money from his work.  
     “I met Emilio Mercado” (his mentor?  Carofano nods affirmative with a half smile) in Redondo Beach. He was living in an old fire station and would slide down the pole to leave his place. He taught me the philosophy of darkroom. He talked to me. I was intimidated too,” he admits, “sometimes I would call to ask something and he would scream—‘I’m right in the middle of printing damn it’—and slam down the phone.” 
     “Sometimes I will spend about three days straight in this studio.  I have no idea what time of day it is when I am in here, it’s like Las Vegas.” Carofano jokes and is momentarily blinded by the dawn as he retracts thick black photographic curtains to let a guest disappear out his front entrance and into the world.  
     “I’ve lived almost everywhere in the South Bay I moved here six years ago because I love the people. There is a reality about them.” Since Carofano moved here, the art community has flourished as never before in San Pedro.  
     He has opened up this town’s art culture because he knows how to hang poignant work and throw a good party. He has raised the standard of showing art in San Pedro with the help of a few good friends. He is keen and has the eye for the minutest detail. This is why he is mastering his craft and can readily recognize the same process in others—“I like the work of Ron Linden, Neil Nagy (painter and sculptor) and Voychek Szasor, whose last show at LAHC (Los Angeles Harbor College) entitled, ‘King UBUsh Present(s): ...   Jarry’s Pataphysics—the science of imagery solutions & the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World,’ kicked ass! I think there are some masters at work here swimming in a great deal of mediocrity.”  
      Carofano’s presents his shows with jovial warmth; there’s a special aura on opening nights. Instead of shutting himself in a cold, industrial space to become an infamous harbor hermit, he lights the place up in reds and blue spot lights, pours drinks and brings in velvety musicians. The food is good and the wine flows symposium style.  He finds significant work (like the current delicate Zen influenced painter Hiroko Momi) to show. His wife Arnee is the champion of the loft. It shines with her Bohemian good taste and well-traveled eye for color. “I was a flight attendant for 23 years, you know and I would go to the museums any chance I had to escape into the cities.”  
     Friends float the stairs uninhibitedly to view special mini exhibitions from Arnee and Ron Linden, artist and curator of the L.A. Harbor College Museum. Arnee’s Polaroids are playgrounds for color patterns. She lives her art, her husband’s in particular. “I am his sidekick; I have devoted my life to seeing both his commercial work and fine art work through.” Don’t be fooled by her domesticity, she finishes all of Carofano’s commercial digital shots in Photoshop, which can be difficult for the most refined eye. She attended 13 years of art school. She knows color. Arnee talks about Ray’s work, as she effortlessly does the dishes and entertains roaming spontaneous guests as they arrive for a cup of mid-morning joe to take in current exhibitions. “I believe in what he is doing and what he is saying,” she says.  
     Ron Linden organized the Faces show at Carofano’s loft last spring says, “I think that Ray does sensitive and sincere work. I do not think he is didactic or shoots with an ideology in mind. They have an impact because of their beauty. I think they are fuckin’ beautiful. I do not think he is preaching. I think he dignifies them. He is an individual artist inspired by his visions.”  
     Carofano does something else with ‘Faces’ in this regard. He came in and presented his spin on the near ancient character of this town’s life pulse and despair. His print techniques have received more attention from the effect they propel than anyone in recent history. This might have been on the backburner of his mind as he was creating Faces, to voluntarily show this town the bleak glory of its mystery and quiet tragedy. In turn, it validates other artists’ existences and work here. It may exalt San Pedro depression—makes it throb attractive and valiant. Harbor—sea night visions of obliterated dreams and death arriving behind a foghorn. Maybe that is why artists roam the streets and work here. Carofano might know, he does the same. 
     He is currently in love with a camera called the Holga. It is a plastic camera with two adjustments; one setting is a picture of the sun and one of the clouds, though he has tripped his with some personal adjustments to maintain control over his shutter. He takes it out to the Mojave Desert where he finds traces of the trees that invaded his childhood mind, stuffs it with standard Kodak 100 speed black and white and takes it where his imagery and he become one, where he meditates—where the power lines meet the wilderness.  
     “Carofano’s deeply mystical, split-toned images of burned palm trees and cacti with the quiet presence of high-tension wires or freeways did something different. He did not directly make the equation: man caused these fires through his exploitation of the natural environment. He did not treat it blandly or prosaically; he treated it in beautiful, subtle ways,” notes Bill Kouwenhoven editor of Photo Metro magazine. The images of his youth collide with the introspective challenge of a barren desert landscape. The desert trees rarely have leaves or life, and even if they do he will choose to shoot a tree trunk over a flower. The roots. He depicts juxtapositions of sawed off tree trunks and vast, fading mountains. “Man is present in almost everything I do,” he quips—a hint that connects his desert landscapes with the Faces of Pedro, each a reflection on the other.