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.