A Paul Chaleff Vase Series

In this series of photos, taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8F, I focus on a vase made in the 1980s by noted American potter and ceramist Paul Chaleff (he’s shown above in a portrait I took at his studio in 2023). 

Born in the Bronx in 1947, Paul studied ceramics in Japan in the early 1970s and on returning became a major force in reviving traditional wood-fired pottery in the United States. In his studio in Ancram, New York, one sees not only works from that era but also the gorgeous, monumental sculptures he has been making more recently. A heavy-hitter – his pieces are in the Metropolitan and numerous other museums – Paul is also an incredibly kind friend. He took time to help my young daughter make the tiny vase, below, on one of our first visits to his studio a decade ago.

The Chaleff vase I photographed for this series sits on a table near a window in the room where I see clients for psychotherapy. I placed it there in 2020, at the start of the Covid pandemic, a time when the enforced switch to teletherapy made me (and many of my colleagues) doubt whether in-person sessions might ever return.

I wanted to use the camera to record the effect of the late winter sunlight as it came in through the window, gilding the pitted ceramic (a sight I see every day). Abstraction wasn’t a driving impulse, yet moving into macro range with the Planar wide open — exaggerating focus falloff — seems to have taken me, if not to pure abstraction, then at least to an impressionistic realm, new territory for me as a photographer.

Except for the first photo, made with a Polaroid in 2024, I shot this series on Kodak Portra 400 using a Rolleiflex 2.8F with Rolleinar 2 and 3 close-up attachments. The variations in color derive from the way the light from the window hit the vase over the course of an afternoon, interrupted in places by dark shadows from my body and the wrought iron bars outside. The window bars are proof positive that my office is indeed in Brooklyn! While it’s often tempting to make major adjustments in post, I kept the edits to a minimum, owing both to a lack of fluency with Photoshop and a perhaps unnatural fear of disappearing without a trace down a digital wormhole.

Thank you for reading and looking.

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