Props

At my dad’s fiftieth birthday barbecue, Joe and Pete came over with six packs and water rockets. They were the kind of aqua-explosives that required excessive pumping in order to maximize the height of the launch. During the party, they worked as a team, Pete holding the module still while Joe torqued it up good before letting it fly. The rotation of the rocket acted as a lawn sprinkler, spraying water on those below. What impression I gave my friends that my dad was into air-propulsion jet toys I don’t remember. But I do remember the air show. Pete chortling in his hushed, rollicking way while Joey cranked them up with boyish enthusiasm. Those things were flying all over our yard, and at some point one of my dad’s softball teammates tapped the ash off his cigar and asked what those fucks were up to.

Joe often brought props to a scene. Whether it was water rockets to enliven a backyard party or jello-colored dinosaurs to grace the dashboard of his van, the introduction of objects to a place deliberately changed the atmosphere. Since Joe was also a master of video production, it’s not surprising that many of his photos owe their interest to the props, sometimes called mise-en-scene, that lend elements of story to the moment contained in the frame.

David in his Bedroom 1994.

In “David in his Bedroom,” the props share the stage with the person they serve to describe. The black coffee, Camel cigarettes, busy ashtray and book overturned and opened to a page all make up the foreground and combine to imply that we have intruded on someone perfectly content in his isolated world. The guitar and television on the right border sit opposite a window covered by a printed textile, further enclosing David with his humble belongings and sealing him off from the outside world. Still, this is not the filthy artist living in abject squalor, as the peeping bottle of Clorox - not center stage but center frame – reaffirms for us that a life of chosen seclusion need not be one without everyday practicalities.

Phil at the Mantle 1994

Joe was a perfectionist with his sets. Every detail within the frame had to contribute to the overall effect; otherwise it was jettisoned. In “Phil at Mantle” the gothic effect is achieved with the help of the objects that column the center of the picture. The old-fashioned perfume bottle brings us to a world of antiquity, and reminds us that self-adaptation occurs every time we put something on, including fragrance. The spider plant that rains down in regenerative sprouts visually mimics Phil’s hair, even merging with it in the mirror image. The bonsai acts as a calming device, stabilizing the viewer as we negotiate the division of opposing worlds, the actual and the reflected.

Giorgio with MacDonald's Cup 1994.


I think Joe was having some fun with “Giorgio with MacDonald’s cup.” He might even have been calling attention to the whole act of using props by blatantly abusing the practice. Can we really contemplate the complexities of life, as Giorgio seems to be doing here, sipping from a cup whose place of origin brags of one billion served? If you’re a fan of irony, like me, you’ll appreciate the effect Joe is after here. And it comes with fries.

For the most part, the props that appear in the above photos are either pre-arranged or manipulated by the photographer for full effect. But not this one. Joe got lucky with “Girls Getting Ready.” Let me rephrase that. What I mean is that the props that make this photo interesting are readily available to him. First of all, he has entered what is traditionally forbidden territory – the bride (Amy) getting ready while her attendants fawn all over her, plying her with compliments and wine. Thus, we are all privy to the private affair.

Girls Getting Ready 1995.

Not only that, but someone besides Joe seems to have entered the room, judging by the variety of reactions that look offstage. As we swerve across the room and gauge the undulating figures, the expressions of annoyance, indifference, modesty, puzzlement, shock, and cheer heighten our curiosity and up the dramatic stakes. Who has barged in and what have they seen? The tangle of snow-laden branches in the window framing Alice and Sarah add to the tension, and seem to slither into the room. Moving back across the room we follow the serpentine swirls of the wall shelf and mirror sconces, one of which shines light on Andrea, while the other coils over her head. I’m not trying to suggest witchcraft here, but the empty wine bottle and open paper bags add to the secrecy. Just what kind of sorcery was afoot here we are left to wonder. The prim little flower girl in the center stands as straight as the bride, clutching the bouquet tight and balancing the occasion of the photo with puritan decency. Joe’s artistic instinct is timed well here, as the props that already exist season the mood of the photo.

Joey understood how objects in a frame could jazz up atmosphere, but he used them both sparingly and purposefully. A perfume bottle, a loaded ashtray, a wax cup, and long ago a water rocket were all things he used to suit up the scene. My dad’s birthday celebration would not have been as memorable without those rockets shooting up and raining down.

Me, Joe, and Pete at Dad's Fiftieth. Taken by my mom, I think, after putting an end to the antics. Medfield, MA 1984.

Discretion was a mode of discipline Joey cared little about. It got in his way and would make him shrug, even today. He knew what was necessary according to his own quick survey of the immediate landscape. The rest was audience.

A Brief History in Four Parts

Family

At four years old Joey could drive a nail flush and ride a two-wheeler without training wheels. His early interest in musical instruments – trumpet, drums, guitar, and piano – encouraged his parents to enroll him in music for tots. He could play any sport he tried and was always looking for other things to do that challenged him. “I did notice at an early age Joey was extremely creative with his hands,” says Carol. “He enjoyed drawing and building.” As a teenager, he could fix any electrical and plumbing work. He could take apart an engine and put it back together, if only to stave off boredom. In high school he could jump tombstones in a snowmobile. By the time he finished high school, he was more than qualified to install carpets on his own.

Joe Cafferelli Sr. started C&J Carpet in 1968 with partner Bob King. He opened the business in Medfield, MA and ran it for thirty years. In 1978, C&J Carpet began a family run business, which Joe Sr. referred to as a “mom and pop operation.”

Joey and his younger siblings, Jeff and Kim, helped out on their summer vacations. After high school graduation, Joey became a full time employee of C&J Carpet. Joe Sr. retired in 1998.

Carol and daughter Kim

In his early twenties, when Joey struggled with drug addiction, Joe Sr. and Carol stepped in to help get him clean. He told me once, quite matter-of-factly, that he didn't think he'd live past twenty-five. The way he was accelerating into the world of hardcore drugs at that time made me think his prediction might be accurate. When he did hit rock bottom, his parents were there to help. Their support in getting Joey into rehab paved the way for his second career as a Photographer. Quitting drugs ran concurrent with hanging up the kicker, jammer, hammer stapler, seam tape, hot iron, and other tools of the flooring trade. Joe Sr., Carol, Jeff, and Kim would all support Joey in his art, attending his exhibits and posing in whatever way he directed them to at family get togethers.

Jeff Cafferelli at Sister Kim's Wedding. August 24, 1996.

Addiction/Recovery

It’s hard to know for certain what enticed Joe into serious drug use. I've always suspected it had something to do with his innate talents, as odd as that may sound. Mechanical things came easy to him. Drugs may have been that extra challenge he needed when his days became too predictable. Too easy. It may have been a retreat, or a mind expander, or something to fill a void left while his friends enjoyed the relative luxury of college life. Or maybe drugs initiated him into an underworld that fed his growing desire to express himself creatively. I don't know.

Giorgio in his Room, Arlington, MA 1994.

I worked with Joe for a while after college, laying rugs. In the morning I would drive from Charlestown to his apartment in West Roxbury and wake him up so we could go get the van loaded for whatever jobs we had lined up that day. I began to discover increasing amounts of heroin paraphernalia in his apartment that he took little care to disguise. There was a vacancy in his expression, and every morning I edged into his apartment, wary of what I might find.

Paola, Boston, MA 1994.

In 1994, a few years into Recovery and a couple years into RISD, Joe had an exhibit of his photographs at Art Market in Jamaica Plain. He shared the gallery space with fellow Medfield artist Steve Matthewson. Many of Joe's photographs featured people in different stages of addiction and recovery. There was a kind of brutal honesty to the photographs that revealed in Joe the need to document the pain he had himself experienced and survived. Recovery became his next addiction, and it was the vision of a recovering addict that became the identity behind the lens and often the subject in front of it. I was glad that friends and family were able to merge for this opening and celebrate the artist Joe was shaping into. Photography gave him purpose. It was the mechanical thing that made the abstractions of addiction and recovery concrete.

Rome

Joe started college a decade later than the rest of us, and before you could blink he had acquired two degrees. From 1993-96 he attended Rhode Island School of Design, where he met Erin, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Video. In 1994, Joe and Erin were both admitted into RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. After graduation, Joe and Erin moved to Chicago to continue their work in the arts, and from 1997-99 Joe attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video.

Erin Hasley in Capri, 1995

For the next two years Joe took on various teaching appointments in Chicago.

He was an Adjunct Professor in the Video Department of SAIC; he was an Instructional Technician for Video Machete, a non-profit community-based youth organizing and education project; he was an Artist-Teacher for the Marwen Foundation, a non-profit organization providing art education to underserved public high school students; he was an Instructor in the Academic Computing Department at Columbia College; and he was an Instructional Technician in the Video Department at SAIC. He was the recipient of numerous Grants, including the Open Society Institute, The Crossroads Fund, Girls’ Best Friend Foundation, Learning Matters, and The Illinois Humanities Council.

When they moved back to Boston, Joe worked from December 2000 to May 2003 as a Technical Support Representative for Media 100 Inc., in Marlboro, Massachusetts, providing twenty-four hour product support for all Media 100 Digital Video Editing Systems, MediaPress, Cleaner 5, MPEG Charger and Super Charger encoding packages. In the months prior to his death on December 3, 2003, he was preparing to teach a Photography course at RISD, the place where his second career had begun.

To look at his resume, the European Honors Program in Rome appears as only one on a list of many accomplishments in a relatively short, ten-year period. However, to look at his whole volume of work is to see Rome as his coming out party.

I think it was both the program and the place that fueled his productivity. It’s a period in his life when he began to take more chances with his photography, to challenge convention, to trust his teachers and classmates in learning the more acute aspects of his craft, and to come to an understanding that the peaks and valleys of his past life were now fertile ground on which to redirect his art.

Yutaka on her bed at the Hotel Arenula, Rome, Italy. 1994

Friends

When I was in college out at UMass, living in a large battered house on School Street in Northampton with seven or eight buds – the number and faces changed with the semester - Joe made semi-regular trips out to visit me and our larger circle of friends.

Bob and Kristen at the Cyclone Halloween Party, Boston, Massachusetts. 1993.

One late night, Joe decided that the white wall of my bedroom was too, I don’t know, plain. Safe? Too virgin? Whatever his assessment of it, that deviant look in his eye and the mischievous fan of his brow made it quite clear that this wall in front of him was now a newly-stretched canvas beckoning him. I had taken a few art classes and had enough charcoal, paints, and pastels lying around to quench his creative impulse. As often had been the case in the past, and would be in the future, I became passive audience to his recklessness. It was an odd kind of recklessness, though, one that was tempered by order.

Kristine and Paul Janovitz at Buffalo Tom's Red Letter Day Record Release Party. Boston, MA. 1995.

Once he had a project in mind, nothing could ever stand in the way of his pursuit of it. Paint brush in hand, be began to swipe my white wall with purples and blues and yellows and blacks. Then with his other hand he started flicking paint at it in sudden bursts, speckling not only my wall but my records, my typewriter, my turntable. Before long my entire bedroom became a kind of three dimensional Jackson Pollock splurtation that left me agape with worry and wonder. My cautions about security deposits and evictions didn’t seem to concern him in the way it did me. In fact, you might say it encouraged him, taken more as fodder than warning. It fanned his artistic tempest. There was a clear purpose to his creation, and as he worked he became evermore demonic and detached. There was nothing I could do about it, so I just stared in disbelief.

Sarah and Pete Simonsen at Cyclone Halloween Party. Boston, MA 1993.

In the following weeks, fellow residents of 11 School Street - Bob, Jay, Pete, Jamie, Bill, Tom - brought others in to view Joe’s exhibit. I’d be sitting in my chair reading John P. Marquand and a couple people would knock on my door and then force their way into my room and bust out laughing, pointing at the multi-media chaos on my wall. As victimized as I felt at the time, I have come to look back on this event as one of many announcements Joe would make that art was exploding from within.

That kind of Iggy Pop verve was something Joey remained highly attuned to even in his advancing years as a photographer. Joey loved to document his experiences. In our post-college years, Joey never showed up anywhere without his camera case. Whether it was someone's wedding, the beach, a record release party, a rock show, a Halloween party, a road trip, or just a casual get together, Joey would bust out his tripod, camera lamps, various lenses, and turn wherever he was at into an instant studio. He would take dozens of shots and later pour over contact sheets to decide the right one to print.

Hank Peirce at the Beach House, Salisbury, Massachusetts, 1994

When I used to work as Joey's lackey, I would marvel at the way he would orderly unpack and repack his toolbox with the kind of precision that underscored the quality of his craftsmanship. Everything had its place. Later in life I would see him unpack and repack his camera case in the same way - the zoom lens replacing the hammer stapler - and it always reminded me of how much talent he brought forward from his youth. I think maybe the reason I have lived a longer life than him is because my talents were not as prominent as his at an early age. I banged my fingertips black and blue before I could hammer a nail straight.

A Revealing

On a warm, grey Saturday in August of 2004 Erin Hasley and I drove out to visit Carol and Joe at their home in Wrentham, Massachusetts. It had been about eight months since we all stood in Saint Edward’s church saying goodbye to their son. Carol fixed us some delicious chicken sandwiches for lunch, and we passed that afternoon trading Joey stories. It felt good to laugh with them. It was time for that and we all seemed willing to allow for it.

Erin and I spent the rest of the afternoon sifting through the stacks of photographs Joey had thematically stored in labeled boxes. Not surprising since everything the man owned had a place chiseled out for it. We were grateful. He took care of the initial organization for us, which was needed given his prodigious output. And yet, we felt with each lift of a box cover the removal of a casket lid. So many pictures, each with a memory, a story, a mood, a vision of his world, a sad remainder. For months we had been talking about putting together a show for Joey, possibly even a book. Carol and Joe were willing to support whatever project we would fashion, allowing us full access to their son’s basement studio. Take anything you can use, they said.

Hours of shuffling boxes, naming portraits, rubbing temples, and not knowing what to claim and what to leave behind left us limp. We sighed at each other with little left to say. It was simply too much.

Joe Sr. and Carol at Kim (Cafferelli) Marchetti and Paul Marchetti's wedding

And then Carol and Joe came downstairs. Take it all, they said, as if to lift the shroud they knew was weighing down the room. Maybe they sensed our weariness, or maybe we had worn out our welcome. We could have been there all night. It was too big a job. We thanked them profusely, flattened the back seat of my Golf, and loaded her up. With everything. Even his music – Bauhaus, Peter Murphy, Schuyler Heinkel – everything.

All we left were a couple of computers, whose contents, without a password, would always remain entombed.

Almost seven years have passed since we hauled away Joey’s black and whites. Seven and a half years since he passed. Over those years Erin and I have met many times at my house, where his work has resided, and we have waded tirelessly through his photos. We have separated and labeled. We have created spreadsheets and files. At times we laughed our asses off. Other times not. We have distinguished between must be seens and must never be seens. We have had over to the house Paola Savarino and Giorgio Della Terza to survey the work in which both of them figure so prominently. They were good friends of Joey, Giorgio his close confidant, Paola his artistic mentor.
Giorgio Della Terza and Paola Savarino

Erin and I have enjoyed many splendid lunches together (thanks to Rosie)and planned for shows. And yet, we have been delayed by the immediacy of our ongoing lives and wearied by the ever-conflicting notions of whether to hoist the dead or allow him rest.

In February of 2007, Erin curated an exhibit of a selection of Joe’s photographs and video at Piazza Cenci 56 in Rome, Italy. It was a show organized in conjunction with Rhode Island School of Design’s European Honors Program, in which Erin and Joe both took part during the school year of 1994-95. “He returned several times to Italy,” Erin writes on the show’s invitation card, “drove the Autostrada fearlessly, and documented his travels with photographs and video.” Many of Joe and Erin’s classmates and friends attended, as did current Honors Program students, as did members of Erin’s family. In fact, many of those attendees helped in the transport, repair, and hanging of the works. For Erin, it was an enormous achievement, one built on faith and reliance, calling on past and current participants of the Program to help pull it all together. It shows what a community of like-minded people can do when honoring one of their own.




















Both sides of the Rome Show invitation

Erin’s curatorial debut was entitled “Altro Sara Svelato,” or “More Will Be Revealed.” It was an expression that Joe often used during their program in Rome back in the fall of 1994. “If he was uncertain or at a crossroads,” Erin explains in the show’s leaflet, “- whenever patience was needed - Joe would say, ‘More will be revealed.’” The Rome show was a long process brought to completion for Erin. Its beginning, middle, and end were expertly documented in her accompanying PowerPoint put to her own music. There is now a very important stone there that marks his spot forever with this Program, with this country, home to his ancestry. But more importantly, home to where he realized artistic happiness. The Rome show was one of the nicest gifts anyone has ever given.

This blog – a virtual gallery of photos and essays - will also have a beginning, middle, and end. It will be a project that attempts to feed off the energy created by Erin’s show, an attempt at another means of making good on Joe’s promise.

Joe and Erin en route to Amy Custance and Paul Hamilton’s wedding, where Joe was the wedding photographer. 1995.

It would be fitting for his saying – more will be revealed - to ring prophetic and recurrent, as he has left behind for us so many images, so many memories, so many stories to tell. Whatever plans Erin and I originally had, the exercise of uncovering Joey’s photos has always felt communal. It is my hope that this is a place where friends and family, acquaintances and admirers of Joe can view his work, talk about it, celebrate it.

The photos included in this project might ring nostalgic for those who favor the backward glance: an array of portraits, landscapes, and stills taken primarily in the eighties and nineties. For Joe, this was a period of experimentation, destruction, rehabilitation, friendships, self-discovery, and entrance into the art world. My narrative accompaniments to these photographs are associative, as a friend and follower of his work. Joe and I sometimes talked about doing a project together, his pictures with my words. We did a little bit of that over the years, but maybe this blog in some way can be the accrual of those plans made long ago. I look forward to working with him again and welcome whoever wants to join us.

Joe and Matt (me with hair) at Watertown apartment, 1986