Ron Raffaelli Project Gets Rocking and Rolling
For those of you watching from afar, you may remember me mentioning my motivation for this long and strange trip I have been on over the last thirty-some years. It was Rolling Stone Magazine that I fed on from the first, then evolved into a lot of other types of photography and photographic influences. I didn’t know at the time how all the rock-and-roll would manifest itself. The doors of magazines were slowly closing, and the money people had taken complete control of the artists – their image, their direction and they contained and controlled their essence. As young as I was, I recognized the Rolling Stone ship had sailed.
That didn’t mean I didn’t love Annie Lebowitz, the best of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, the best of Texan Mark Seliger’s work, Interview Magazine … the list goes on and on. But I am one of those people who constantly wondered, and still wonders: Why am I doing this? Why am I digging this? And – – – What is this rock-and-roll infatuation leading me to?
Maybe I finally have, so many decades later, found the reason. When I talk to the Ron Raffaelli heir, I know the names, the stories and the musicians she is talking about – not literally, as Ron Raffaelli did, but I know enough to carry on a conversation … about Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick, Sonny & Cher, Liberace or Eric Clapton. Sure I am dropping names, but it’s all there — Ron Raffaelli may be the most famous forgotten photographer lost in the history of capital “R’s” Rock-and-Roll. My life’s timing may have been wrong to end up behind the camera, but maybe this is the reason.
Fortunately, I was able to wait out the previous owner of www.ronraffaelli.com, and now own that URL. I have more than 1TB of images to go through, and they are not exactly organized, but who cares! It’s a treasure chest and it is full of real treasure. Now the search continues for a good format for the website.