Bernard McCaffrey “Relationship”

Bernard McCaffrey’s photographic love affair with the human form is legendary throughout the Valley, in the U.S. and, more recently around the world via the internet.

It’s been demonstrated by more than a dozen solo exhibits from Ottawa to Pembroke and Eganville to Bancroft, by the presence of his photos in collections in The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Indiana University Art Museum and The Kinsey Institute Art Collection, and on the world wide web where, since August of 2008 he’s been number one in lifetime hits out of the more than 6000 Canadian artists on www.artistsincanada.com.

Though educated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from the City University of New York, enhanced by over a year of studies in the museums of Europe and the Near East, it was in Canada that he discovered photography as his main mean of expression in the visual arts. During the fourth and last year of military service in the U.S. Navy Air he was stationed at Argentia, Newfoundland. With a darkroom on the base, abstract like World War II anti-submarine equipment on the docks and time on his hands, it was the start of a photographic obsession.

In New York City in the ‘60’s, besides teaching photography, running a photo studio and doing solo exhibits, he operated, along with his wife Patricia, The Ferewhon Gallery on Manhattan’s lower east side. There visitors such as Duane Michaels, photographer, Alan Ginsberg, poet and Andy Warhol, painter and film maker, came to exhibit openings.

When he first arrived in Canada he taught a year long photographic extension course in Killaloe for Loyalist College. After a decade of setting up an off grid organic farm, he began doing photo publicity work for Development and Peace, including an exhibit of photographs of his two years of volunteer work in Peru. With that he was back on track doing photography as an art medium and in 2000 he started up a five year project of The Ottawa Valley Photographers Co-operative.

The exhibit features over 40 images in black and white, colour and handcolour. Most of the black and white images were printed in his solar powered darkroom. Only two of the images are digital, the rest shot on film. Being off grid, McCaffrey finds that darkroom work uses four to five times less power than a computer.

Mr. McCaffrey’s work can be viewed at www.artistsincanada.com/mccaffrey and his blog is at www.bernardmccaffrey.blogspot.com