Ray Carofano


Ray Carofano is an American photographer who lives and works in the Los Angeles port town of San Pedro.

Life and work

Carofano's career in photography spans over fifty years. It was first a hobby, then a passion and finally a profession. His self-education in photography began at an early age when his parents gave him the complete set of The Encyclopedia of Photography. He studied at Quinnipiac College, Southern Connecticut State College and Paier School of Art.
In 1969 he started Ray Carofano Photography Inc., specializing in product photography with special effects. When he wasn't shooting ads and brochures for clients he was doing his own personal work. In 1991 he began focusing more on fine art work and less on commercial work.
Carofano's early work was mostly street photography - marginalized people on the fringes of society inspired by the sight of railroad "hobos" he had witnessed as a boy. In 1998 he began Faces of Pedro, formal studio portraits of local "characters". Bill Kouwenhoven, contributing editor to HotShoe Magazine, wrote; "Ray’s portraits are haunted by the haggard visages and dark shadings that speak of those moving through long nights looking for something that was, and might never be again." Carofano's decades-long Faces of Pedro reflects his ongoing engagement with this early passion.
Carofano's subjects have shifted during his career, beginning with figurative subjects - even human feet - and moving towards landscapes and the Mojave Desert. The desert, and the detritus left by inhabitants long gone, started in 1993 and is on going. Broken Dreams, the 23-year project, examines the disconnect between the American dream of independence and the realities of social isolation. These subjects were further explored in his series Terrene and High Tension. The Terrene photographs reveal Carofano's penchant for documenting the environment as it cycles from life to death, desolation to renewal. His most recent work, riverrun, shot entirely in color, documents the Los Angeles River.

Criticism and commentary

In 2014, in Looking at Images, Brooks Jensen wrote about Carofano's Mystical Transformation photo series: "His highlights are sharp and precise, while the shadows are diffused. He combines the fully conscious and the deeply subconscious in his graphical images."
Karen Sinsheimer, curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, described Carofano's work this way: "Whether the subject matter is of the human body, man-made structures or nature, Ray Carofano’s images are anything but commonplace. An artist who works solely with the camera, his subjects are reality-based yet he renders them with fresh vision. His indeterminate, desolate landscapes of matter mostly burnt, dying or dead are profoundly evocative, depending on the “psyche” of the viewer. To some, they suggest tranquil beauty, to others mystery and death. Carofano's landscapes seem infused with metaphysical meaning."
Carol McCusker, curator of the Harn Museum of Art, wrote: "In Carofano’s photography is a sense of deep time, history, erosion, decay, passage and renewal. He takes these abstract ideas and literally allows them to abstract the things he is drawn to. The edges of his world blur, creating images at once literal and metaphoric, apocalyptic and expectant. They are transcendent, reconciling the forces of nature with man’s optimistic attempt at permanence; within each a recurring cycle of cultural death and exultant rebirth."
Sheridan V. Merritt, Professor Emeritus, University of La Verne, in his catalog essay for riverrun at the Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography, wrote: "I must admit, when I began viewing Ray Carofano’s images of the Los Angeles Flood Channel I did not expect—did not intend—to find beauty, tenderness, resilience, or reason for optimism there. I was pleasantly surprised. For example, using the concrete channel walls and floor as backdrop and reflective sheets of water as mirrors, Carofano captures haunting kaleidoscopic images that lift the virtual conversation above the mundane coarseness of rebar, concrete slabs, and engineering genius to the possibility of transformation, even restoration."

Publications

Solo exhibitions