Lucy Gellman Photo
Three summers ago, you could have found Chris Randall furiously painting beneath an underpass on State Street.
Vandals had tagged over the smiling portraits of people from the neighborhoods on either side of the bridge, smearing over foreheads and blacking out eyes. Photographs meant to transform a harsh place into a celebration of humanity and connection had been desecrated. Randall was determined not to let the vandals triumph.
Thomas MacMillan File Photo
So he took his paintbrush and meticulously painted over the graffiti (pictured above), working 14 hours one Sunday, as supporters joined him.
Randall teared up as he recalled that experience in an interview on WNHH radio’s “At The Moment.”
“We ‘d worked on it for so long, so many people,” Randall said. “I just felt like we had to do something … and it actually brought us closer, and stronger.”
Chris Randall Photo
That has become a mission for the man, and his popular, effervescent photography site “I Love New Haven.” With a sharp eye, clear lens, and sometimes creative touching-up on the computer, he has become perhaps the definitive documentarian of our changing city, celebrating what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained.
Randall was born in New Haven, and grew up in New Haven, his history written in the streets he’s lived on, the places he’s seen, the people he’s photographed.
His father was a draftsman who worked at Winchester Repeating Arms, making gun barrels. As a child, Randall would borrow his father’s Minolta, but it wasn’t until the age of 35 that he began taking pictures.
When he graduated from high school, Randall wanted to work with his father. So he went to work at Winchester. But he had trouble holding himself together: he drank and did drugs, eventually getting himself fired because he missed work too many times.
Then there was the car accident.
He’d been drinking, and he was driving, fast, down I‑95 very late at night. He passed his exit.
“The music sounded so good I just kept driving,” he said.
And then there was the semi-truck, and then he was underneath it and then spinning, rolling out onto the side of the road. He was bleeding from his head.
Chris Randall Photo
There was a warrant out for his arrest. So, dazed, he ran into the forest and lay in the leaves. People called out to him and he realized, finally, that he was not OK. He called back, was rescued, and woke up in the hospital.
Chris Randall Photo
On “I Love New Haven,” Randall posts pictures of the people of New Haven, sometimes with a story, sometimes with a “surprising fact.” One of the photographs is of a man named John (pictured). In his caption, Randall writes, “He survived himself (homelessness and addiction).” Chris Randall has also, it seems, survived himself, and his work is the richer for it, humane, joyful and gentle.
Accidents & “Happy Surprises”
Chris Randall Photo
After his accident, Randall was determined to turn his life around. He moved into a new apartment. An anonymous complaint from a neighbor about his loud profanity-laced music made him want to prove that he could be a good neighbor, and an invitation to join in a community garden gave him that chance.
“My life is just a series of accidents and happy surprises,” he said, reflecting on that letter. Soon, he was involved with the New Haven Land Trust, for which he began taking photographs.
Photography soon became the center of Randall’s life, the method with which he engaged the world.
“Sometimes I’ll be in a rut, like I don’t want to leave the house,” he said. “It forces me to interact with people and my community.” Interested in the abandoned buildings that are among the last vestiges of New Haven’s industrial past, he visited the Old English Power Station and the old Winchester Arms factories with his camera. He repeatedly visited some of the old Winchester Arms factories . These places, he said, are our history, and we have a right to them.
This “urban spelunking” came to define Randall’s work, as he went in repeatedly to these buildings, drenched the resulting photographs in psychadelic color and contrast, to give them an eery, surrealistic feel.
“When I take a picture, make a picture and edit a picture, I’m trying to show the mood of a scene or the building I’m depicting,” he said, “or the soul of the person I’m photographing.”
He and “I Love New Haven” co-founder Jeffrey Kerekes started the blog in 2012, inspired in part by Humans of New York. They and other photographers post photographs of the city – some of which have become iconic – and of its people.
Part of their motivation, Randall said, was to complicate conceptions of New Haven as a dangerous place. His photographs reflect this: like the Humans of New York photographs, they and their accompanying texts are often surprising, charming, funny, heartbreaking. A ruddy-faced middle-aged man who once sat on an atom bomb to change a lightbulb, for example, or a small gentle-looking young man who used to play for the Tarheels but movee home and works at Walmart so he can take care of his ailing mother.
Thomas MacMillan File Photo
Randall’s involvement in “Inside Out,” the public portrait photography project on the underpasses, evolved out of the same mission. New Havener Ben Berkowitz, founder of community-reporting platform SeeClickFix, was interested in how they could turn an underpass that divided neighborhoods into a bridge that connected them, and reached out to Randall to work on the project. They assembled a crew of photographers to take photographs of people in surrounding neighborhoods and paste them, large-scale, on the State Street underpass.
“It showed me just how powerful photography and art could be,” Randall said, “to building bridges.”
“The blessing [of photography] is it causes me to look beyond. Most of my pictures have been taken all in New Haven. And New Haven’s only one place. So I have to continually make my eye bigger … so I think I’m now intimately connected with where I live because of it.”
A Photo Lifeline
Chris Randall Photo
Randall’s personal revolution was imperfect, and very publicly so. When he faced allegations of embezzlement from the New Haven Land Trust in 2014, he was forced to again face his weaknesses. Photography – and the connections he’d made through photography – gave him a lifeline as he dealt with the fallout. Hundreds of people reached out to him, he said, and told him, “We like what you do in New Haven, and it’ll be all right.”
In our interview, he reflected on the experience: “Yes, it’s part of my story, and I know I’m far from perfect. People are far from perfect. But also, if none of that had happened, none of this would have happened, either.”
Perhaps it is this knowledge of universal imperfection that makes Randall’s portraits so powerful. His lens seems to see through stereotypes, beyond judgment; his desire to connect and his love for his home evident in his photographs.
On the I Love New Haven blog, there’s a place for submissions. It states: “We know that love can be complicated.” That’s an apt description of Randall’s well-documented love affair with his home city.
Major talent here. I love his work and am proud to say I have hired him in the past.
He's had an interesting and varied life on the way to finding his niche.