Installation views from The Ancients and Chinatown.

Occasionally I work in collaboration with art directors, designers and private and corporate clients to make site specific pieces.  Frequently these photographs are shot environmentally over a period of days, weeks, sometimes over a year.

I also have an ongoing project imagining and anthropomorphising habitats and narratives of the birds and animals that live in, under, and around my house in Northern California.

caitlin (at) caitlinmccaffrey (dot) com

707 290 7608
PO Box 1558
Healdsburg, California 95448

STUDIO
21025 Geyserville Avenue
Geyserville, California 95441

Note:  Post Office does not deliver to studio address

My photographs are often quite simply about light, though they may suggest dreams or memories half-recollected.  The process I embrace involves inching towards revealing clear memory, or understanding.  I find myself most interested when my response to an image remains in flux; developing.  Photographic protocols and chance elements are acknowledged and welcomed.  Light leaks, digital artifacts, adjustments in depth of field, patterns, compositional tropes, a sense of place, flare and shadow—all evince potential for surprising and satisfying views down the rabbit hole of perception.

I grew up on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco and later lived for ten years in New York City’s Chinatown. These images were taken at night in both of those neighborhoods.

In my photographs there is frequently an undercurrent of discomfort, of movement, as if the subject were breathing, offering itself to be found and seen; apprehended if not fully understood.  Evocations of feeling states:  weightlessness, warmth or cold, anxiety or hope, induce a shifting response—sometimes pleasurable, sometimes difficult— reflecting complicated states of existence.

The artwork is editioned and available for sale. Please contact me to buy prints, talk about having a show, or work on a collaboration.

Contact 

These images are of Greek and Roman statuary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at the Getty Villa, Malibu.  They are produced as both tintypes (using a wet collodion process developed in the 1850’s) and as pigment prints.

Evanescent moments of connection between the observer and these simultaneously remote and familiar objects are explored.  The statues are referred to as individuals, as people—breathing, looking, –engaged with something or someone specific.  The interplay between images contains certain narrative suggestions.  The portraits are mysterious, but nonetheless present and complex; as substantial, knowable, and yet distant as any photographic subject.

My Photographs are often quite simply about light and about suggestions of dreams or memories half recollected. My process describes an effort to inch towards the revelation of clear memory or understanding. I am most interested when my response to an image I have made remains in flux, still developing—photographic processes, techniques,  and chance elements are equally acknowledged. Light leaks, digital artifacts, depth of field, patterns, compositional tropes, sense of place or character, flare and shadow—all can proffer cryptic views down the rabbit hole of perception.

There is frequently an undercurrent of discomfort in the pictures, of movement, as if the subject were breathing, offering itself to be found and seen—apprehended but not fully understood. Evocations of feeling states (warmth or cold, anxiety or hope) often induce shifting responses depending on mood, and reflect complicated—possibly pleasurable, possibly difficult—states of existence.

A successful image distils a sense of a particular moment, a captured present eliciting imagination and curiosity—about other people’s stories and maybe even elements of one’s own.

BIOGRAPHY

Caitlin McCaffrey has a BA in Photography and Literature from Bennington College, VT. She has also studied at the International Center of Photography/NYU. Caitlin McCaffrey has exhibited in solo shows at the Fresno Art Museum, The Sonoma County Museum of Art and has been included in group shows by the Oakland Museum and by the Pages Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Whitechapel, London.

McCaffrey has an avid and active interest in photographic history and antique processes. She worked for ten years as a printer and staff photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She has produced commissioned work for collectors, designers and architects. Editorial work has appeared in magazines, journals and newspapers including Esquire, Elle and The New York Times.