Bio for Photography Exhibition February-March 2008
James Kaval
American, Born 1955 -
James Kaval was born in Yonkers, New York and grew up in Pearl River, New York. He has more recently been a resident of Rockland, Westchester, Orange and Putnam counties. His first assignments as a photographer were taking sports photographs for his high school’s yearbook and later for local yearbook photography companies. James worked as a stringer for the Journal News before attending the Rochester Institute of Technology, from 1974 to1978, where he studied photography both as a science and a fine art.
James’s previous exhibition to the current one was in 1977, at the Rockland Community College library. He is currently the artist-in-residence at Crow House, the residence of late Rockland artists Henry Varnum Poor (1888-1970) and Anne Poor (1918-2002), his stepdaughter. Crow House was and in some respects remains the epicenter of the artistic life of Rockland County. James’s passion is uncovering and preserving historic architecture, especially photographically.
He recently stated, “Inspiration at Crow House simply requires you to go wherever it leads. Crow House gave me these images, which show you what it is and what it once was, with perhaps its last breath. Its fate, now, is up to the broad community of art lovers. The images, however, belong to Rockland County, as Crow House does.” James added, “As far as my photography is concerned, I’m not looking to change history, simply to record it for future generations before it disappears.”
King's Daughters Library, Garnerville, New York, February-March 2008
Photography Exhibition description
Exhibition Title:
CROW HOUSE
Rockland’s ghost of the past
“I’m not looking to change history, simply to record it for future generations before it disappears.”
– James Kaval
To begin to understand my photographs, it is important to understand the social and technological eras in which my interest in photography began and has continued. I call these two periods of time B.D. and A.D., as in Before Digital and After Digital.
> B.D. Before Digital
When I was a senior at Pearl River High School, in 1973, my best friend demanded that I pick up his Nikon camera and shoot sports pictures for our yearbook. The proverbial gun to my head was empty, but the Nikon came equipped with plenty of film, and shoot I did. Guidance from my high school art teachers, Gerri Schletter and Marvin Vlosky, provided the foundation for an understanding of photography as a fine art. Images by Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol were stimulating if not compelling. I was a hopeless romantic existentialist by then and was also writing songs and poetry. I now had another avenue of self-expression.
During the early 70s the people of the United States were divided, as they are today, over the justification for an overseas war. The draft had ended in January 1973, five months before I was to turn 18. I was relieved to say the least. Peace talks were being energized by carpet bombing. The war was slowly coming to an end.
Earlier, in 1968, Pulitzer Prize winning combat photographer Eddie Adams had captured, one of five photographs that changed history, an image of a Vietnamese general (our ally) putting a gun to the head of a suspected Vietcong soldier. This gun was not empty. The photographer’s camera had captured a bullet as it exited the skull. The savagery of this act stunned the nation. Images of the My Lai massacre, by Ronald Haeberle, soon followed. The nation was being educated about a war through the camera lens of extremely brave combat photographers. Their images were being published. There was little media blackout then, unlike today.
With the fears of war and death behind me I soon focused on my future. I was fortunate to be able to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology, the premier photography school, which was closely associated with Eastman Kodak.
I studied photography as both a science and an art. Photographers such as Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Richard Avedon, W. Eugene Smith and others showed a widening range of subject matter and technique. Two photographers in particular, Lewis Hine and Diane Arbus, showed me that it takes courage even off the battlefield to take great photographs. The most famous persons I photographed during this time were Lady Bird Johnson and Count Basie.
These college years, when I was studying photography as a science, turned out to be the beginning of the end of an era. During this time the age of silver-based negatives and prints was in full bloom, and every photographer had a darkroom. Hours were spent making first the negatives and then the prints. There was plenty of room for error. A great print was art, and producing it was expensive.
> A.D. After Digital
With the advent of digital photography came a greater appreciation of silver-based prints than ever before, which may explain why it took me a while to invest in a digital camera. I jumped in the shallow end of the digital pool with a Kodak 4.0 mega pixel camera with Schneider optics in September 2004. I bought it mainly because of the optics and the price. I still use this camera today. All of the digital images in this exhibition were made using this camera. All the prints were made by me at various Kodak kiosks on Kodak paper and all within minutes and with no chemicals. Now that’s A.D.!
I must be honest and say that I have mixed feelings about digital photography. What I like most is that I can shoot lots of pictures. In fact, too many pictures. This creates a real dilemma…editing. I now spend hours editing on a computer, not in a darkroom. It’s not as much fun. In the darkroom, with all the chemicals and laboratory apparatus, you found yourself becoming Dr. Frankenstein, even though it was all just in my basement.
But the variety of computer software on the market provides some powerful tools for editing, and it takes considerable time to master these tools. The truly unfortunate downside is that images can no longer be trusted to record the truth. If published today, few would believe Eddie Adams’s image was real. This is what we have lost in A.D.
So now with truth out of the equation, I feel freer to experiment with what the computer software can do with the images I capture. What you see as the viewer is often not at all what I captured initially. Subtle abstractions to blatant ones are the rule here. Cliché images can be revisited and retranslated. Some of my favorite images I didn’t even take. My digital camera took them without asking me. At first I started to delete them. I now see the magic in these collaborations.
As an artist I am not concerned with whether I like or dislike an image. (And you shouldn’t be either.) The criterion now is whether I find an image interesting. Does it have something new to tell me? We see a lot of images, but how many are truly interesting? Certainly you know them when you see them.
Ruth Orkin once said, “I like photography because I get people to see what I want them to see.” Now in A.D. we can get people to see what is not there. I hope you find these images interesting.
James Kaval
