As a child, I loved to walk the railroad tracks in my small hometown in upstate New York - adventures carrying me beyond the boundaries of familiar neighborhoods. This was exciting and frightening and these wanderings have lasted a lifetime. I now travel the railroad tracks in the center of Tucson, Arizona’s Sonoran Desert.
I do not start with a particular preconceived notion or point of view when making photographs. Image making is an instinctive perception and intuitive process that creates a visual dialogue between my surroundings and inner self. This work is disturbing, confusing, beautiful, and revealing.
I am cat-like; wandering with my camera. I glance at a razor-wire gleaming in the sunlight, shining between the clouds; the shoes of angels float high in the heavens, I would love to wear them. A feral cat slinks along a roofline as an immense sky rises above a raw landscape. Lately, as I read in the daily newspapers, I think about the devastating conflicts in the Near East (Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Afghanistan) and visualize desert-war landscapes. ~ Joseph Labate
Joseph Labate’s photographs reflect his unique artistic sensitivity as he presents Arizona’s industrial-desert landscape and the powerful forces of nature. His wind-burst images are dark and luminous, soft and hard and beautiful and ugly. Emotionally, they are comforting and disturbing, alarming and alluring, real and dream-like. They seem to illustrate the primal elements (Fire, Earth, Air, and Water) that pictorially contrast with the razor-sharp, linear, and powerful industrial objects. Labate’s vision reflects his personality, like a Rorschach Inkblot test in reverse. As we interpret his provocative images, they function as a window to our souls and worldviews.
Joseph Labate is an assistant professor and chair of the photography program in the School of Art at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Labate’s artwork and his teaching focus on the use of digital technology as applied to photography. He received a B.S. in engineering from Clarkson University, a B.F.A. in photography from Massachusetts College of Art, and an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Arizona. Labate is a recipient of a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, an Artist’s Grant from the Contemporary Forum of the Phoenix Art Museum and an Artist’s Grant from Polaroid of Tokyo, Japan. His work is in many private and public collections including the Center for Creative Photography, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Snell Wilmer Collection, Streitch Lang Collection and the Weeks Gallery permanent collection.