Searching For Buddha's Finger

Caitlin McCaffrey: Searching for the Buddha’s Finger

When:  Fri., Dec. 14, 2007 – Sun., March 2, 2008
Where:  Fig Garden Village Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., Dec. 14, 2:45 pm

On Clarity and Reverie:  Photography is as much about imagination as “fixing” the perceived world-as much about images imprinted in the mind when your eyes are closed as when they are open. Film, light, chemistry, and pixels are the media. Technique, intent, and serendipity create dynamic flux within pictures. Stillness is simultaneously comforting and disquieting.

- Caitlin McCaffrey

Caitlin McCaffrey’s recent series of photographs represents a return to the Chinatown neighborhoods of San Francisco and New York – the series is a nostalgic memory-laden impressionistically atmospheric tone poem of nighttime emanations of light, the fleeting ghosts of unnamed feelings captured in the camera’s exposures of 30, 40 or 50 seconds of time. An earlier series represented by the twenty small dark photographs of place were photographed in Famen and Beijing and serve to ground the tone poems of this year.

The title for the exhibition refers to a strange journey McCaffrey made by train across China – a kind of pilgrimage to Famen Temple west of China’s ancient capital of Xi’an, at a site on the Silk Road en route to Baoji, Tianshui and Lanzhou. The origins of the Famen Temple can be traced back to around AD 20, although its octagonal pagoda of thirteen levels dates from Ming times. After the death of Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, relics from the body of Sakyamuni were distributed by the Indian King Ashoka to many places in the world where Buddhism had taken hold. Famen Temple was awarded a single finger bone and a stupa was built to house the relic – later the relic was moved to the crypt of the pagoda. Over time, the relic was lost  - in 1987 it was rediscovered in a crypt beneath the pagoda’s foundation where Buddhist monks had hid it during the Tang Dynasty when Buddhism was under attack. Little did McCaffrey know that an exhibition would find its name from this sightseeing journey.

Caitlin McCaffrey was born in San Francisco and raised in the North Beach section of the city. She received a B.A. in Photography and Literature from Bennington College, Vermont. For three years prior to leaving for New York City in 1990 she owned and operated Percey’s Newsroom Café, a popular restaurant in North Bennington. From 1990 to 1999 Caitlin McCaffrey was a staff photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, documenting installations and events, making archival black and white prints from historic glass plate negatives and shooting large format set-ups of paintings, sculpture, jewelry, ceramics and furniture for publication. A rewarding and painstaking project involved photographing reliefs of intricately detailed miniature seals and rings for enlargement and permanent display in the ground floor Greek and Roman galleries. Her work has been featured in exhibition posters and the bi-monthly members magazine and she was principal photographer for several books and exhibition catalogs including “The Royal Art of Benin”,  “Anselm Kiefer”, “Sun Pictures: The Rubel Collection” and “The Met and the New Millennium” by museum director Phillipe de Montebello.

In 1996 Caitlin McCaffrey was chosen by the museum to document the archeological excavation of the pyramid at Dashur, Egypt, an assignment involving regularly climbing down a 100’ ladder to photograph the subterranean discovery of a noblewoman’s tomb. Artifacts and relics recovered from this dig are now at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Since her return to California in 1999, McCaffrey’s professional work has focused primarily on portraiture, events, landscape, food, and the wine industry. In 1999 and 2000 she photographed “Capital Ventures”, an annual review of the community-building philanthropy of Washington D.C.’s largest private foundation. Long-term personal projects revolve around public markets, landscapes, flowers, and interiors evoking memory and introspection. Her profession has taken her to England; France; Japan; China; the Caribbean; and all over the United States. Publications include The New York Times; Time Magazine; The Wine Spectator; New York Magazine; People Magazine; Entertainment Weekly; Metropolitan Home; and Esquire. 

Exhibits Underwriters

We appreciate the generosity of the following organizations and individuals for sponsoring the Winter Exhibitions at FAM:

  • James and Coke Hallowell
  • Dumont Printing
  • Electric Motor Shop
  • Bonner Family Foundation
  • Women's League
  • Harriett R. Stratton Trust
  • Mrs. Jane Cleave