Kevin Klipfel – Sha La La, Man

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

What happens when art tries to avoid becoming Art? That’s what I asked when thinking about Kevin Klipfel’s Sha La La, Man. I have my own ideas by way of an answer, but it is ultimately up to viewers to decide for themselves.

The book views like a personal photo album and is divided into two sections. The first has photos taken by Klipfel of Buffalo, New York, and the second images of New York City. Interspersed with these are numerous family snapshots. There are captions at the end of the book, but few are dated, meaning the viewer telescopes back and forth, largely unmoored in time, from a more-or-less contemporary present to a past when Klipfel and his wife were children, or to even before that, to his grandparents’ wedding in 1947.

One of the book’s dominant themes is food. In the first section we see family recipes prepared by his mother – manicotti, braciole, cutlet sandwiches, cannoli. There are also photos of traditional local products and dishes – mortadella, fried sweet peppers, cherry pepper hoagie spread, roast beef on weck, and artisanal sausages – as well as the stores and restaurants themselves – Pellicano’s Marketplace, Scime’s Sausages, and Kelly’s Korner.

In the second section, with photographs of New York City, the food and places are perhaps iconic (although if you, like me, are not clued in they will not resonate much) – Caffé Roma, Da Nico, Piemonte Ravioli, Holiday Cocktail Lounge, Chelsea Papaya, and Doc Holliday’s. Many of the photographs in this section were made in and around the storied Hotel Chelsea. We see photos of Interview magazine; an Andy Warhol book, film, and photos; a room-service cheeseburger; and images of Klipfel and his wife.

What is the significance of these and the other photographs in Sha, La, La, Man? Like with many photobooks, the images decode as an iconography, but an iconography that when it veers personal, we may not be able to follow, other than to understand that we are outsiders looking at another person’s lived experience. This is a common feature of contemporary photobooks and is especially prevalent in the world of zines. Klipfel’s lived experience we see documented in family photos and hometown foods as well as his times in New York City, walking the same streets that Art World Giants have tread before him.

A casual photo-album aesthetic sets the tone for the book. The photographs are sometimes blurry and washed out, just like in real photo albums. Tonal values have not been improved to make the colors brighter. If you look at the captions, you can see that there are groupings of photos of the same places or subjects, but you could miss this if you are just leafing through the pages, as the book invites you to do. As in a typical photo album, the organization is loose rather than tight, with numerous repetitions and asides, and even the major transition from Buffalo, New York to New York City goes almost unannounced.

There is a downside to eschewing conventional photo “quality” and forgoing techniques of book editing and narrative building, the goal of which is to engage, inform, and entertain the viewer, to capture and hold the viewer’s attention. If you oblige viewers to meet you where you are, the risk is that some will not.

To be fair, it is a risk that always exists in art. The writer of the introduction, James Martin, makes the case for Klipfel’s approach in his introduction, reminding us that the history of progress in art is defined not by what critics say but by what artists do.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Kevin Klipfel – Sha La La, Man

Photographer: Kevin Klipfel (born in 1981; lives in Los Angeles)

Language: English

Text: James V. Martin

Design: Kevin Klipfel and Lyndsay Klipfel

Printing: Typecraft, Pasadena

Softcover; 162 photographs; perfect binding; printed insert with Spotify playlist link; 144 pages; paginated; 10 x 10 inches; ISBN 979-8-218-67003-0

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