photographer

Arcadia is a vision, not a place; a version of Eden in many ways, where paradise is all the sweeter for its destiny to be short-lived. It takes many forms in history and in literature, and for Pintauro, whose vision ricochets from memory to memento mori, from the passage of time to timelessness and resurrection, it is a concept left to the fates, as Milton might have said.

Recently, the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historic Museum in Sag Harbor, NY underwent an extensive restoration to its historic exterior. Pintauro, who lives in Sag Harbor, fixed his gaze on the four diminished Corinthian capitals, longstanding across the upper façade of this treasured place, built in 1845. Worn down by the elements, the hand-carved acanthus leaves take on new life here, their accreted and moldering surfaces amplified through Pintauro’s lens. And this is not just any lens, but a Hasselblad (the camera used in the Apollo moon landing), which is available for rent to artists worldwide.

Pintauro arranged to be raised up in the bucket of a lift-truck to go eyeball to eyeball with the capitals, focusing in on them at arm’s length to capture every crevice and chasm of their wilted beauty. For Pintauro, whose father was a cabinetmaker, the ravaged wood has a special significance, and the resulting portraits are dazzling. Digitally silhouetted against velvety black grounds, they possess the classicism and portent of Greek gods as well as the grandeur, now dimmed, of Sag Harbor’s maritime and whaling industry.

Photography, long considered one of the standard bearers of objective truth, has been transformed in the last few decades. The elastic nature of video and digital photography has made the idea of “truth” seem almost anachronistic. But Pintauro locates truth in the long view, both in ethos and aesthetics The majestic tree depicted in The Tree, Its Shadow and the Hill on Ocean Road still stands at this site, but now, just five years later, it is surrounded by hulking mansions, pool fencing and patio furniture. “That tree will never see its shadow again,” the artist has said. The tree exemplifies Pintauro’s vision of an Arcadia in decline, now hidden behind the hedgerows. The inclusion of the artist’s shadow, placed squarely in the lower quadrant of the image, transports us between then and now, to a romantic sublime fraught with self-consciousness and a context that lingers between fact and fiction.

Likewise, January Thaw, Hydrangea and Once Upon a Time in Sagaponack reference growth, antiquity and the sort of elegance carried only by an aging and untamed grace. The immaculate detail, visual complexity and hallucinatory ambiance, breathtaking in its all-over quality, is transcendent. A different utopia is seized in Mars, the candid portrait of a bronzed lifeguard perched high above the beachfront at his station. Like Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de Medici, this buff American icon acts as a heroic, reflective sentry—a witness to the human condition. For Pintauro, who grew up surrounded by literary allegory, the umbrella cast open above the lifeguard’s head acts like every bit a crucifix, its narrative all the more potent as the viewer absorbs the broken spine along its apex.

In Einstein’s Dream, double houses printed on Japanese Kozo paper seem to blink between glimpses of time and space, as if separate realities were occupying the same time. This disembodied juncture, manifest in wispy clouds that swirl above each frame, each one a little different, creates a hazy disparity between the here and now. For Pintauro, the work pays homage to his favorite painter of the Late Renaissance, the great Paulo Veronese, whose compositions were invariably situated at mid-ground, as if all the world were a stage. Likewise here the artist sets the houses at the bottom of the frame, like railroad cars, with fully two-thirds of the composition shooting upward into an eternal sky. Like a doppelganger, the image is repeated in duplicate, but while the house remains the same the clouds have shifted, as if a layer of temporal reality has been peeled away. Einstein’s concept of parallel realities was not a dream, exactly, but a plausible and distinct probability. Within this arena of arcane physics Pintauro digs in, exacting moments from this vernacular farmhouse and its environs as if sampling String Theory and its exigencies.

As the American photographer Edward Weston insisted, “To see the thing itself is essential.” For Pintauro, whose immaculate vision seems to reach around all the sides of a person, place or thing, this couldn’t be more true. The romance in Joe Pintauro’s exquisite photographic works is the visual experience.

PETER MARCELLE PROJECT

4 North Main Street, Southampton NY 11968

Standing at the same spot, north of the house, before the front door and between the twin trees, in and out of the four seasons, I have gathered hundreds if not thousands of photographs marking changes surrounding the house and its two trees, through various times of day, starlit nights, wind storms, snow storms, hurricanes, even bright summer days, through every sort of temperature variation and movements of our world around the steady solar source, the sun, the giver of light.

The twin trees report a great deal in how their leaves live, bloom and perish by they own inherent wisdom. In autumn, trees shut down their sap spouts and revert toward sleep. Before the last leaf detaches from the mother tree, she is already putting forth fledgling leaves tightly wrapped in leathery covers, to endure the coming cold. In the warmth of spring the leathery covers unfold in a rebirth of tender leaf material, ready to meet the challenges of the sun.

My camera suggests a small Hadron Collider, an imagined instrument that will identify light, energy and matter around a single subject on its journey through space and time. Ivy has discovered the interior warmth of the mud room, bringing to mind Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, in which the last leaves, branches and flowers of the year emanate like speech from the mouth of the summer goddess, just as winter, dark, malevolent and rapacious, is about to surprise her and steal her away.

Not only nature but all man made constructs report some relation to the earth’s journey. One may conclude that we as well are subject to the comings and goings of light, of cosmic energy and matter and that in the course of our lifetimes, our bodies, skin, hair, breath, love, sickness and recovery are parts of the same story, a tale of our sacred romance with our own existence and the tale of the miracle of existence itself. We too are tossed about in our journey through light and darkness, caught in the rapture of our planet’s flight around the sun.

Einstein Dreams

This unremarkable house exists in a most extraordinary location, relative to its quadrant point on the earth. The house is anchored by potato and corn fiends to the North, after which there is eventually the wide Long Island Sound and the rest of the United States. To its South are ocean dunes, the Atlantic ocean and what lies beyond. A compass places the house at 162 degrees South, South East, a line, which uninterrupted, crosses the equator. There is no other structure behind it that does not exist in a foreign country. But this is a small farmhouse on a tree lined Main Street in the United States of America. It has, a cellar door, a back pantry, a back year, and then the mighty Atlantic ocean. It’s rooms have not changed in over a half century. The back door pantry has been invaded by ivy clinging to interior walls, as if the house is trying to marry itself to nature.  And yet, it provides a cozy welcome to it’s inhabitants. The curtains on the first floor are simple, the kind that used to be washed and dried on stretchers; white, translucent, reminiscent of the 1930’s. Wax fruit sits in a decorative bowl on the dining room table. A round washing machine on wheels is in the dining room corner. Its inhabitants have asked me why I have photographed their house from one identical angle over many years. The owner invited me in to photograph him and some of the rooms.

My first photograph of the house was an attempt to catch a flock of geese flying over head but looking at the print, I saw that the house was set low between two tall maples, which like spires, book-end the house to both the east and west. Between the trees and above the house, there is always a great stretch of sky which changes by the hour and often, by the minute depending on the wind and the changing seasons. (* Note two winter photos printed on Kozo rice paper created the title for the photo project: Einsteins’s Dreams.)  I try to mark the movements of the earth with  these photographs of the house as the trees and the house go through various diurnal and yearly photoperiods. The two trees are for me, barometers of planetary activity. Suns, moons and stars appear over this house which measure the passing of time and suggest for me, cosmic riddles of one kind or another. The house in that sense is a sun dial, covered in cedar, pine and paint, facing wind, rain, snow and sun, it’s past, present and it’s future.  

This is hardly comparable to smashing protons in search of new particles. Far less dramatically, I’m marking surfaces surrounding the subject.  Each day the question is: what became of yesterday’s light? What is happening in this new day, this new hour, this minute that never took place before, and how contradictory and magical is it, that within the house nothing seems to have changed in many decades while outside its rooms. everthing is in a continuing flux from one second to the next? Why do it’s inhabitants, which go back generations, hold the rooms so dear and constant, even welcoming nature inside?  But then Boticelli made of ivy, speech, emerging from the lips of an allegorical character representing seasons. We persons endure the same seasons and age and since we are small parts of the cosmos, even in our bodies, we wonder how alike we are to this house? In psychoanalysis, dreams of houses are often about the self.

One  hundred years, or two, from now, what will have become o the house and its two trees and ourselves?  What will hurricanes, tornadoes and the rising seas make of  the lawns around the house and of our selves and our planet which is rapidly warming? The tree on the left is already in trouble, defoliating more and more every year, far ahead of its sister on the right, but it loses it’s leaves much later in autumn, when the sister tree is almost bare.  

Snowy owls, Canada geese, migratory swallows, foxes, deer herds which surround the house now, will survive in generations, if we help them. It seems that they, along with the house endure the seasons without any extraordinary protection, in nests of grass and straw, and like them, we live, and huddle in our own lairs and wonder about cosmic riddles we can barely only imagine, like this house and ourselves, all figures in what might have been, Einstein’s dream.

Joe Pintauro, 2016