"In Sha La La, Man, photographer Kevin Klipfel turns the camera inward, using family photographs, vernacular snapshots, and newly made images to grapple with time, memory, and the quiet terror of impermanence. Sparked by a return home to New York after more than a decade away, the book unfolds as a visual reckoning with inherited identity, loss, and the people and places that shape us. Moving fluidly between past and present, professional practice and amateur gesture, the work resists polish in favor of intimacy, embracing imperfection as a way of staying human in an increasingly artificial world ...
A very thoughtful meditation on what it means to love, remember, and be present."
-Kellye Eisworth, Editor, Lenscratch Magazine
Klipfel's Sha La La, Man "reminds us that the history of progress in art is defined not by what critics say but by what artists do.”
-PhotoBook Journal
Transforming the ordinary into the avant-garde, the lo-fi brilliance of Sha La La, Man refreshingly 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. Proving the timeless wisdom that "the personal is what makes art matter," Klipfel's innovative 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.
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 ...
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.
