Described by PhotoBook Journal as the rare work of art that comes along “reminding us that the history of progress in art is defined not by what critics say but by what artists do,” Sha La La Man employs an expansive conception of the fine art photo book medium by combining Klipfel’s original 35mm film photographs with old family photos, personal artifacts, and hand-written Italian-American family recipes passed down through the generations.
 
Inspired by the snapshot aesthetic of his mother's family photo albums, Sha La La, Man follows Klipfel's viewfinder through the Italian-American culinary traditions playing out for the last time in his mother’s kitchen; the nearly extinct world of family-owned pork stores and distinctive local culture of Buffalo, New York; the last remaining ghosts hanging around NYC's Mulberry Street and Little Italy; the still-standing dives of Downtown Manhattan’s East Village and Lower East Side; and the intimate interiors and hallowed facades of New York’s legendary bohemian enclave, the Hotel Chelsea, capturing personal images of heartbreaking beauty with nothing more than a cheap, disposable film camera, and colorful artistic eye.  Proving the timeless wisdom that "the personal is what makes art matter," Klipfel's bespoke self-portrait is sure to stir universal reflection on the nature of personal identity over time, the meaning of family and home, and the viewer's own search for authentic modes of being in an increasingly artificial world.
 
“What happens when art tries to avoid becoming Art?”
 
Transforming the ordinary into the avant-garde, the lo-fi brilliance of Sha La La, Man refreshingly answers this tired Art Critic's question by opening up our tired eyes to the potentially revelatory visual vernacular of the every-day: 
 
Something real. 
 
From Sha La La, Man's Introduction by philosophy professor James V. Martin:
 
"The phonily posed, oversaturated, extensively-edited photography we’ve grown accustomed to is encouraged by an era in which many capture images in order to develop their “personal brand” or to “influence” by shilling false signifiers of wealth---what Basquiat might’ve called “Gold Wood”---to their followers. But why should ordinary people accept these commercially-dicated standards and demand or even value slickness?
 
The photographs in this collection remind us that things weren’t always that way and that they needn’t remain that way now. They seem to suggest that if we can see the present as being at one with a past that was more of a home for people peopling, some of its apparent inauthenticity may be redeemed. And the photography means this “seeing” literally: because these images were mostly taken with cheap, disposable film cameras and aren’t color-corrected, they look like images taken this way always have---the viewer often can’t clearly tell who took which pictures when and for what reason ... But they bring us back to a time when kids got excited by birthday cakes decorated with freehand drawings of Mr. T or simple, felt Yankees pennants, when people took pictures not for “content” but to have fun with their new toy cameras, and when these images went no further than family photo albums. They also bring us to see a present where the same ideals can reign and where there are still places for the beauty of the ordinary to reveal itself.
 
That these photographs are personal, even intimate, can’t be denied. But they generalize: if you’re of a certain age or from a certain part of the country, many of them look like they’re pulled from your own life. I can see myself sitting at the table in the collection’s opening image excited by the $5 my great-grandfather always snuck into my hand when he shook it. You can, I’m sure, find in the collection more than one image that you can imaginatively and emotionally enter into too. If the art here can make your heart bat la chamade because it excites some past hopes and loves or joys or drums up the electrifying possibilities represented by New York City and the Chelsea, that’s no mere Gold Wood: it’s something to hold onto.
 
Sha la la, man. Don’t let it slip away."
 
This 144 page softcover book is 10x10 inches fine art object bound and printed locally in Los Angeles, California using traditional bookbinding methods.