From David Rosenberg’s article concerning artworks by Robert Calafiore for Photograph Magazine:
Calafiore’s work with the pinhole camera began as a challenge. The assistant dean at the Hartford Art School, he has been teaching photography for over two decades. He often asks his students to build their own pinhole cameras as a way of introducing them to the fundamentals of photography. Around a decade ago, he decided to try it out himself and quickly became hooked on the format. He built large sets, a nod to the enormity of the ancient ruins he visited in Italy during his childhood. He used male models in his earliest photographs, inspired by classical Greek and Roman art, but he eventually turned to a collection of glass he had acquired from his family, who came to the United States from Sicily in the 1940s. The glassware had always been a part of his life, stored away in cabinets and hutches that, Calafiore said, “represent the beginning of a new life in the United States, after leaving behind the homeland of Sicily.”