Issue 06
Adam Wallacavage
By Caleb NeelonIllustration By Jim Houser
Everyone has an idea of their dream house, but photographer Adam Wallacavage lives in his. “When I was a kid,” he explains, “I watched The Addams Family, and I always wanted a house like that. When I had a studio at Space 1026 I really fixed it up, but it was really unfulfilling because I didn’t own it. When my wife and I bought our house, I could really do it, and now I ’m going crazy! Sky’s the limit!”
From the outside, it’s a standard-issue South Philly browns tone on Broad Street. Inside, you’re greeted with themed rooms : a firs t-floor living room populated by hunting-lodge trophy bucks, pheasants, and bears mounted on plaques and a grand, ornate mirror rimmed with intricate plasterwork, all of which matches the molded plasterwork around the edge of the ceiling and light fixtures. Adam is a free diver and spear fisherman,s o he built an underwater-themed dining room, complete with portholes and an octopus chandelier. From the color of the drapery to the molded plaster chandelier tentacles, all of it was made by Adam’s own hand, with the help and support of his wife Kathryn, who runs a jewelry company called Tiara Misu. Between them, the house has been a multi-year project, and has required that Adam pick up a number of news kills .
“Building things is just commons ens e and confidence,” Adam explains, “and I got a lot of the confidence to build things in my eight years as a Navy Seabee (a member of the U.S. Naval Construction Force). Our saying was ‘we build, we fight.’
“My ultimate goal, artistically—and I don’t really know where all the photography even fits into this—is to make something that is worth preserving and maintaining. I wonder what will happen with my house when the time comes for me to move out of it.
“Coming up,” he continues, “ I have as how at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York, where I’ll be showing as et of octopus chandeliers, as well as as how at Shelly Spector Gallery in Philadelphia with Andrew Jeffery Wright where I’ll be showing a retrospective of photographs Is hot of Andrew over the past15 years. Both of theses hows are in support of my book. Even though the chandeliers have nothing to do with my photos, I like the idea of doing somethings o different from my photos. Jonathan’s gallery is more of a commercial gallery and I’ve always had a problem selling my photos as art objects, I guess because I’m stuck in the idea of producing functional things to sell. A chandelier can be art, but it also can light up a room. I like the concept of having my photographs in a book, since I never see my images by themselves ; they’re always in a big heap.”
Whether at work on his home or behind a camera, Adam Wallacavage is a collector: of objects, of friends, of interests, and of an aesthetic. He’s been an elder brother to a generation of Philadelphia artists and skateboarders, and like every good photographer, he has the ability to become invisible at will, unobtrusively setting up some lights and letting his subjects do their thing undisturbed, whether they happen to be an artist friend, a skateboarder, or a theme-park scene packed with neon and freaks .
“Most of my aesthetic comes from Wildwood, New Jersey – what we in Philly call ‘down the shore.’ Is pent most every summer there as a kid, and as a teenager my folks got a summer house there,s o the times pent there increased from then.” Wildwood is a kind of Coney Island with seedy edges smoothed over by crazy ‘50s –style motels. The Wildwood tourism office boas ts that the town contains, along with the National Marbles Hall of Fame, the largest collection of mid-century commercial architecture in the United States, now labeled “ Doo- Wop,” lining a two-mile boardwalk. “I picked up a camera for the first time in Wildwood when I was about 16. I wanted to document all of these old 1950s motels that are in that area, that and things like the Wacky Shack and Castle Dracula.”
Adam began to take pictures in Wildwood one summer while working in a surfs hop. “I us ed to have my friend help me take pictures ,” he explains, “but it got to be too much trouble and Is tarted to go by mys elf.” Adam and his friends in the mid ‘80s were skateboarders at a time when there really wasn’t much interest in it. Still, every crew of skaters needs a photographer, and Adam’s interest in photography soon got him some work with skate magazines, which at the time paid photographers just a bout enough to process a few rolls of film and buy a sandwich.
The stakes changed in the coming years, to say the leas t. Adam was one of the first to shoot photos of a little suburban Philly kid with huge ambitions : Bam Margera, one of the most recognized faces in skating today, with Jackass, CKY, and Viva La Bam under his belt. Adam explains that he liked Bam’s scene “because it was s o much more than what was going on with skating at the time. Bam was skating, but he was doing other crazy things as well. Skateboarding at that time was turning into a jocks port, and was basically ‘Fresh vs. Hes h.’ I was into the DIY scene where skaters built their own ramps and didn’t take things too seriously.”
However much the skating scene has changed over the years, Adam’s favorites haven’t: “To this day, my favorite skaters are people like Dan Tag and Rick Charnoski. They would be doing these insane vert tricks and jump off the deck and just act like raving lunatic clowns. I wanted to shoot skaters like that for Thrasher but all they wanted back then was lame street-tech crap with little wheels and big pants. I was never the kind of skate photographer who ‘bro-downed’ and went for the big names, mainly because I’m a bit shy, and because of that I’ve developed this idea of avoiding the obvious. What’s the point of shooting something everyone els e is s hooting? It’s being documented,s o I like to concentrate on things under the radar. Some of those things end up becoming big, which is always fun to see happen.” The res ult of avoiding the obvious has been an especially broad body of photography work.
Photographers of all kinds face the question of photo storage, and there’s no industry standard as to how to do it. How individual photographers choose to organize and house their tens of thous ands of images is up to them, and the process ultimately says a great deal about the photographer. “I worked at a photo lab,s o I would always get these 4×6 prints, and I would put them in boxes .” Adam’s clear plastic shoe boxes are nothing out of the ordinary; but reach into any of those boxes, pull out as malls tack of photos, and Adam’s eyes and hands emerge. While each stack will seem nearly random in assembly, chances are all of Adam’s theme s— artists, eccentrics, Jersey shore hotel sign age, fish, skateboarders, eerie close-ups of garish stuffed or painted animal s—will be well represented in Adam’s signature vividly-saturated color.
He’s now putting the finishing touches on his first book, a collection of his photography from the past15 years. Adam explains, “While I’ve gone and enlarged and framed an individual photo once in a while, I tend to see them as a group and in albums and stuff. Putting together the book, I’m kinda keeping it random,s till, which helps. I’ve always had insecurities about it, like with skateboarding, that I didn’t go fully into it like some people did.
I never took it all the way, and the same goes for the route of the fine-art photographer. But doing this book, I realized that I’ve amassed this collection of all this stuff. It’s weird, but I’m just getting really proud. I’ve noticed how much I’ve learned, and now I just haves o much fun when I ’m taking photos !”