Joseph Mauro, "Calorie Free"
Joe shot the photographs in this book right around the time we met, in fact several of the shots in it are from that show – in 2017, where him and Sean Fennessey and Gyna Bootleg came up and played a bill at Cold Spring Hollow with Virgin Flowers and Kelby Clark from Divorce Ring who were on tour together. A good portion of them document a tour down to Miami to play the International Noise Conference at Churchill’s, a trip I made the same year, and it’s funny looking back knowing we were both at a lot of these shows together and hadn’t met yet. With how shitty my own disposable camera pics from that trip came out, it’s a delight to see high res shots of Bobb Hatt, Occult Blood, and Clang Quartet, who were all real highlights of that whirlwind tour.
Other artists featured include Creep City, Darsombra, Ed Bob, Street Rat, Human Fluid Rot, Period Bomb, Kurt Fowl, Shredded Nerve, Limbs Bin, Radiator Greys, Tinnitustimulus, Dave Public, Lingua Ignota, and Boar
Joe was a prolific documentarian of the noise and underground music scene in the Northeast, and specifically the community in Providence. I was at the peak of my interest in photographing the shows at my house, and he was super down to give me tips and feedback and share work. We became good friends when I moved to Providence, and he taught me a lot about analog photography and shooting street. His knowledge of color chemistry is unsurpassed, and coming out of a period where I was obsessed with lofi aesthetics he helped me to appreciate the achievement of photographic perfection. That obsession with quality is really apparent in this zine, it’s printed on ultra thick high luster inkjet paper- nearly impossible to fold in half and must have taken forever to generate out from an inkjet printer. My own scans don’t do it justice, it’s such a pleasure to look at photographs printed with this kind of care to attention, they have a real luminance and it still feels incredibly lux even after being packed away for so long.
I think photographing shows / concerts is an entryway into photography for a lot of people, it was for me at least. It’s low hanging fruit to snap a picture of someone doing something on a stage. Easy to do well but difficult to elevate past mere document. I don’t think I was ever really a master at it, it was a phase I had to get through in my infatuation with pressing the shutter button- hanging out with Joe and watching him do his thing at shows and the work he did getting in close to get the shot was really humbling, I’m really grateful for the documents he made of my own musical projects.
Joe fell off the map, and it’s been sad to see his digital presence just disappear. There’s so much beautiful work I don’t get to see anymore because his websites expired, his
Tumblrs gone, his Instagram’s disabled. Beyond that it feels like a visual document of a period of audio culture in New England has just been burned up. I’m thankful he shared a lot of his work with me after he moved to Taipei, so that I have a stack of beautifully produced zines, prints and self published books, including a real masterwork about his time in Taiwan, to remember our friendship. It is a reminder for me of the kind of urgency you should have to print, to share your printed work with people you care about, and to spread it as widely as you can.
I implore you to read and admire :) -> https://www.are.na/block/44393812?blockId=44393812&blockProfileId=chattering-teeth&blockChannelId=output-tray&mode=Show&intent=title
And to see also this feature that survives on Japan Camera Hunter, though it's difficult viewing