Joe Puglisi, Photographer

By Ann Hutton

I’m Joe Puglisi, photographer born to exceptionally tall parents in Brooklyn.”

An indefatigable jokester, Puglisi hits me with this introduction when we sit down outside the New York Store in High Falls to talk about his passion for photography. He is tall, but then acknowledges a lifelong case of acrophobia—an affliction which didn’t keep him, however, from flying to Switzerland a couple summers ago and taking a tram 2,970 meters up to the top of Schilthorn. “Never saw the Matterhorn; it rained the whole time I was there. So I went to a little town that sits on a shelf above this sheer U-shaped valley floor. It was so foggy you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I was so disappointed because this was the fourth straight day of bad weather on my $3,000 vacation, and I was just shaking my head…this guy said ‘No, no, you must see the Schilthorn. It’s as blue as can be up there.’ So I spent $50 for a cable car ticket and went up. All of a sudden I started to see the sun…I was in heaven. It was freezing, but I stayed up there for three hours. I didn’t want to come back down.” The cable car freaked him out, though. On the way down, somebody asked in German how high the cable car went, and he thought to himself, “Please don’t…I don’t want to hear this. It was 2,400 feet to the ground.”

Bravery rewarded Puglisi with some magnificent shots of the Bernese Alps, one of which he will use to produce his first poster. His first full art show was in 1990 in a gallery in Stone Ridge, followed by others in Kingston and Newburgh. Never comfortable promoting himself, he has somehow met the right people who put him in touch with the other right people, and his passionate avocation has become a potentially lucrative vocation. For example, he met an agent for photographers who just happened to see the 2007 edition of The Hudson Valley & Catskill Mountains by Joanne Michaels to which Puglisi contributed thirty-seven pictures. The agent wanted to know where he’d gone to photography school, and when he said he hadn’t, she promptly instructed him how to create a portfolio and encouraged him to market his work.
Before this serendipitous meeting, Puglisi had (in his capacity as a bridge tollbooth collector, where he sees the same faces regularly) just happened to befriend an actor who introduced him to Michaels, who used a few of his shots in her fourth and fifth editions of the guidebook. And so it goes. Art photography is not an easy market to enter these days, since everyone has a digital camera on which they can take endless pictures at no cost and maybe come up with a few quality compositions. We take it for granted that anyone can point and shoot. It takes an artist’s eye, however, to consistently frame shots that cause a viewer to pause and gaze into the depth of what she sees.

While I get temporarily lost leafing through his portfolio, Puglisi points to a picture of the Empire State Plaza in Albany (appearing on page 223 in the guidebook) and says, “I love the way the light and shadows interact. I love lines and can pick them out in a shot.”

Whether a picture features interesting architecture or a more natural, even fractal image, Puglisi looks for an angle that might prove to be visually captivating. Check out the Delaware and Hudson Canal in High Falls on page 101 of Michaels’ guidebook. Who would imagine that such a perspective could pull you into the foreground and beyond, where the scraggly trees and sky are deeply illuminated? Michaels was intuitive in her admonition to “just go out and shoot pictures,” and Puglisi’s natural curiosity with the visual world has produced many stunning results.

As a hobbyist Puglisi started out on two Nikons (one of which he hopes to be buried with), learned to develop his own film, and also picked up matting and framing skills, which saves him a lot in production costs. In 2005 he “got dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital era,” also putting him into the position of being able to custom color black and white pictures. He explains that hand-coloring a photo is extremely tedious, and he never felt as though he would master the process. In the digital world, color is eliminated—not added—to an image. He has experimented with this technique with intriguing success.

What’s most surprising about Puglisi’s talent is that it’s packaged in the person sitting across from me—a friendly-but-terminally modest guy who you’d think wishes only to snag you into one of his goofy jokes. He treats you like the unknowing straight guy in his private comedy act, setting you up for a punch line when you don’t even know a joke is in the air. “I entered a pun contest and sent in ten puns, hoping one would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did…” A truck roars by, and he tells me he craves a place with no traffic sounds—sitting in a tollbooth can be auditory hell—where he can relax, contemplate nature and read Proust. “I just finished Moby Dick. I’d never read it, and now I’ll never have to again. The story could have been told in a hundred pages!” Or one really excellent photo, perhaps? He laughs, but maintains that reading fifteen pages of Proust description of a church in the French countryside is totally engaging.

Puglisi has recently begun producing boxed cards with a few favorite photos through his business venture called Riverstock Card Company. Look for them in the Catskill Mountain Foundation (map) Bookstore and other places around the region. He will hang a group of matted and framed pieces in the Kingston Barnes & Noble in November, and hopes to schedule a show at the Foundation’s Gallery in the upcoming year. For information, contact Puglisi at riverstockimages@hotmail.com.