What You Love
By Janelle Lynch
March 2022
Published in What You Love: Photographs by George Cavalletto,
Manhattan Valley Press, New York, NY, 2022
George Cavalletto has always followed his heart. In 1957, after reading Jack Kerouac’s just-published On the Road, he dropped out of an agriculture program at UCLA. Nineteen years- old, with a one-way ticket, Cavalletto hopped on a Greyhound from California to New York, leaving his family and their aspirations for him behind in search of a more meaningful creative life. The pictures in What You Love attest to his achievement.
Cavalletto studied literature at Columbia University and wrote his thesis on William Wordsworth’s love of solitude and nature. Opposed to the Vietnam War, he became an activist and a journalist. In 1969, he married kindred spirit Sheila Ryan, and together they went to the Middle East to report on the Jordanian Civil War. They returned to New York in 1971 and founded a research company to monitor U.S. foreign policy. During the next decade, they had five children, Matthew, Daniel, Nathaniel, Joseph, and Caitlin. In the late 1980s, Cavalletto returned to graduate school to earn a doctorate in sociology. For 20 years, he taught at Brooklyn College courses such as Sociology of Private Relationships, and he published a book, Crossing the Psycho-Social Divide: Freud, Weber, Adorno and Elias. In 2012, when Ryan was diagnosed with cancer, Cavalletto left academia to care for her. He never went back. The following year, six months after her death, he enrolled at the International Center of Photography, intent on mastering the medium.
Cavalletto did just that as revealed in What You Love, photographs of himself, his children, their spouses and kin. Joe and Lamb shows Cavalletto’s inherent aesthetic sensibility and acquired command of composition and technique. The subjects are considered in relation to the elements within their environment, including the gentle light, which complements their nature. The succession of hooks are a powerful contrast and formal device that rhythmically leads the eye to and fro in pictorial space. The curve of the foreground hook is echoed in the scale’s contour, the thin metal hook, the lamb’s body, the man’s body and, ultimately, his hand. At once this image speaks of agrarian life, cultural traditions, and connection —man-to-animal, man-to-man.
Photography wasn’t new to Cavalletto when he began coursework at ICP in 2013. He had started taking pictures as a child after World War II when he received a camera for Christmas. “It was something I pulled out to memorialize a family event,” he told me. In high school, he made portraits of his semi-nude sister. “I remember the thrill of taking the pictures and the shame that overcame me afterwards.” He destroyed the negatives. In 1967, he took a break from his studies at Columbia to live with her for six months in Morocco. “Almost daily I took photos of her that to my eyes celebrated her beauty and mystery,” he said. As a young father, he took thousands of images of his children, mostly “tag along pictures, quick unplanned shots, out of focus.” Cavalletto’s photographs of them today are anything but snapshots. Rather, they are pleasing, thoughtful reflections on self, family, and love imbued with a lifetime of inquiry and rich experience.
The Cavallettos have summered together for the last four decades. Many of the images in What You Love are from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, along the Atlantic Ocean, including Caitlin and Ruben. The photograph embodies the qualities that once drew Cavalletto to Wordsworth and recalls the writer’s poem “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” which begins:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquility;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea
The legendary late Swiss photographer Robert Frank also spent time in Cape Breton. Frank’s The Americans, a poetic document of post-war American culture, was for Cavalletto a visual analog to Kerouac’s On the Road. In recent years, Cavalletto told me, it has remained an inspiration as a “remembrance of a simpler time when the critique of conformist culture could still exist side by side with a youthful innocence.” In his own book, Cavalletto offers a unique vision of innocence in photographs of children and animals and the people who love them.
What You Love also follows the tradition of other photographic luminaries, including Emmet Gowin and Sally Mann, both of whom have made significant contributions to the history of photography with their intimate meditations on family.
In mastering the medium, Cavalletto also became well-versed in photographic literacy, history, and theory. He learned to view images through the lens of the late French theorist Roland Barthes’ notions of studium and punctum, presented in his book, Camera Lucida.
“First we see the photo in terms of its studium, its recognizable cultural significance, a depiction of an almost meaningless objective reality,” Cavalletto said to me, reflecting on how understanding a photograph involves a “veritable double-take.” “Then,” he added, “in certain cases our viewing is broken open by an unsteady revelation of the photograph’s punctum, which ‘rises from the scenes’ and shatters the ordered world of its studium, revealing aspects of a secret dynamic caught by the camera. In this crossing over, surface and undercurrent interact to produce a visual language infused with both realistic detail and magical incantation.” Cavalletto not only perceives photographs with this framework, he manifests the concepts in his own images.
Self-Portrait with Miguel depicts a seated man holding a toddler in a domestic space. Although the subjects are casually dressed, there is a formality about the image. Its frame, background, and lighting are intentional. There is a quality conveyed through the closely cropped composition, the child’s expression and body language, the man’s distant gaze and his grasp of the boy that suggests urgency beyond the need to capture the moment before the boy insists on being set free. The photograph’s “magical incantation” is conjured visually in the frame’s center where the man’s wrists overlap, one taut, the other at ease. It visually conjures the dualities of life and death; past and present; holding on and letting go; and striving and achievement, of which this book—and Cavalletto’s life—are remarkable representations.