Stu Levy
Grid-Portraits
Perception involves the visual synthesis of incremental spaces at finite points of time.
These photographs explore and challenge our perceptive processes by testing the limits of discontinuity, in both space and time, which our brains will accept in reading an image.
Often included in the imagery is the photographer as voyeur and the material artifacts involved in making the photograph, including a Polaroid image of the finished portrait as a compositional element within the image. This self-referential element further emphasizes the act of perceiving, and in addition attests to the collaborative relationship between the photographer, his subject and the objects in their environments.
This work gives a new meaning to “The Decisive Moment”, for the lattice-window view presents a maze of scrambled time and recombinant architecture.
Artist’s Proof and Consequences,
or
What It’s Really Like
Tad Leflar
Mary Real
Elizabeth (Kiki) Leflar
Portland, Oregon 1988
When my artist friend Mary became pregnant, I asked if I could make a before-and-after Grid-Portrait of her evolving family. We began the project about a month before the baby was due. I saw a Mexican paper-mâché doll hanging near a door-way and was inspired to have Mary face the doll and eventually hold the baby as if in reflection of her pregnant self and the doll. As I began the photograph, her husband Tad rapidly sketched his wife, scattering the drawings around his chair. He also found some books on Artist’s self-portraits, which mixed in with the Polaroid debris.
Mary released the shutter for the frames showing the “voyeur”. The first session was lit with a mixture of ambient light, plus a single photo flood lamp. We continued the session when baby Elizabeth was eight months old. We moved into the nursery room, which had been to my back during the first session. We moved the crib in front of the fireplace.
Most importantly, we moved the rug from the first room into the nursery, trying to find the camera position to make it appear contiguous with itself in the first session. We then covered up the door-way with a quilt. I had begun using strobe lighting by this time, and the infant would have been a blur without it. After making the first image of Mary holding her child and the second image of Mary’s legs, I decided to add Elizabeth into the photo again. And again and again. I felt that I had captured a prime moment when she stood on the crib directly under the axe – what a perfect way to get a child to hold still. The assemblage of the two halves created a new “mythical” room, a successful experiment in recombinant architecture. We named the photograph Artist’s Proof and Consequences, but after seeing the multiplicity of his daughter in the photo, Tad added the subtitle, What It’s Really Like.
Bill Crispien
Camera Repairman
Portland, Oregon 1988
Bill Crispien was Portland, Oregon’s guru of camera repairmen, and his shop contains stuff collected over more than thirty years. The two panels on the right show Bill at work at his primary repair desk. The remainder of the image was made on two different occasions in a different room in the shop, showing Bill doing brain surgery on a 35mm camera. His third arm in the center of the photo is holding the legs of my antique camera so they wouldn’t slide and collapse on his slippery floor.
Cherie Hiser
and Her Support Group
Photographer
Portland, Oregon 1988
Cherie Hiser is a photographer who founded the Center for the Eye Workshops, first in Aspen then in Sun Valley. She now lives in her home town, Portland, and asked me to participate in a show she was organizing for her 50th birthday called “New and Old Friends Of the Center for the Eye.” The stimuli for the photo were the fact that her house is a virtual menagerie, and an image Judy Dater had made of her years earlier which appeared in the book “Women and Other Visions” by Judy Dater and Jack Welpott. On an icy day shortly after Thanksgiving, several of her photo students stood on her slippery deck outside her living room, holding her up.
Randers Koch
Artist
Neskowin, Oregon 1988
Randers Koch is an artist on the Oregon Coast who has always impressed me as being hyper-kinetic. A large group of his own work consisted of gestural lines, and one of his artistic heroes is Marcel Duchamp. The photograph was made in the studio of his home which he built. A small section of the studio which I felt was visually non-contributory for this purpose was spliced out of the image. His wife and infant son are in a window over-viewing the studio, and a painting by his grandfather as well as the Polaroid debris cover the floor.
Re:Expose Yourself to Art
Mayor Bud Clark
Portland, Oregon 1992
Before Bud Clark became Mayor of Portland, Oregon, the image of him “flashing” a sculpture became known world-wide as the poster “Expose Yourself to Art.” Campaigning on his bicycle, wearing a rose-lapelled tuxedo or lederhosen, he won a decisive victory, surprising the conservative incumbent who had hardly bothered to take his opponent seriously. During his eight years in office he brought a refreshing ambience to Portland, which has contributed to it’s status as a “most livable city.” I had seen his office when my work was part of an “Art in the Mayor’s Office” show and I was pleasantly surprised at how supportive and cooperative he was when I approached him for permission to make the photograph. His office is filled with symbols of the city, from old maps to election eve pictures, from photos of the Portland Building (designed by architect Michael Graves) to a bronze sculpture of bears fishing for salmon, from a manual typewriter on which he types his reports and memos to a prominent neon rose. The image was made in six sessions spanning six months, usually working on the day City Council met, setting up the camera and equipment while waiting until the meetings were over to begin the day’s photographs. During the six months the office window blinds were changed, and the Mayor decided not to run for re-election.
Jerry Uelsmann
Photographer
Gainesville, Florida 1998
Jerry Uelsmann’s photographs are made of several images blended together using his darkroom magic into seamless, surrealistic fantasies. I’ve known him since the early 80’s, but was finally able to visit him in Gainseville, Florida shortly before he retired from teaching at the University of Florida. The complexity and humor of his images is reflected in the collections of trinkets he has neatly arranged around his home, ranging from a Honk if you Like Stieglitz bumper sticker to a collection of plastic hamburgers.
We both marveled over the fact that the previous year we had both visited and photographed an incongruous exhibit of Peace Buddhas in the Royal Garden of Prazsky Hrad, the hilltop center of government in Prague, so a floating Buddha was incorporated into the portrait.
Walter Chappell
Photographer
El Rito, New Mexico 1999
I met Walter Chappell when Cherie Hiser asked me to assist him at a Nude Photography workshop in the Columbia River Gorge. I had admired his work for years and the two of us started an instant friendship. I learned that he had been a curator at the Eastman House in Rochester in the 1950’s, introduced Minor White to the philosophy of Gurdjieff, and founded the Association of Heliographers, dedicated to abstract photography in the early 1960’s along with several others including Paul Caponigro, Marie Casindas, Carl Chiarenza and William Clift. He lived in El Rito, New Mexico where he photographed, played music, gardened and generally enjoyed life with his friend Linda Piedra. He was to receive the Governor of New Mexico’s Art Award the day after this photograph was made, but suffered a small stroke while packing for the trip. A few months later, he developed pneumonia, and was found to have lung cancer. He died within a year of the photograph being made.
Henk Pander
Artist
Portland, Oregon 2000
Henk Pander has been my favorite painter in Portland for years. He was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands and came to Portland in the 1960’s. His paintings and drawings are often monumental, show grand-fantastic scenes with vibrant colors, and often refer to disasters ranging from Henk’s memories of Nazi occupation years in The Netherlands during his childhood to the more recent shipwreck of the New Carissa on Oregon’s coast. He was a prime mover in the creation of the Portland Visual Chronicle, a collection of art about the City.
When I photographed him, he was reviewing a trove of letters his mother had written to his father before Henk was born; of course, all the letters were in Dutch. He was painting the letters, as well as still life assemblages of his parents’ artifacts.
His studio has large windows which provide Rembrandt lighting. On the left he is standing near his amazing palette and brush collection while working on a still life. In the center are deer and cow skeletons he found in the desert which were slated to be used for his next series of paintings which involved them being ridden by a Don Quixote-like figure. The paintings in the background are: The Wreck of the New Carissa; Waiting, (the Death of Ric Young), director of the Storefront Theater (for which Henk was the artistic director) in the intensive care unit before the setting sun; and a watercolor of the harbor he remembers from his childhood. In the lower right are the stacks of his mother’s love letters.
Stanley Burns, M.D.
Sleeping Beauty
Physician, Author, Collector
New York, New York 2002
Dr. Stanley Burns agreed to let me show him my grid-portraits in a 30 minute time slot before he went to a concert. He responded positively to my work and agreed to let me photograph him when I returned to New York in 6 months.
I came back on Halloween and called, but he said that he was too busy to do the photograph; he was under a deadline to finish writing six books on the history of medical photography before he left for Israel in 2 days to lecture about a show of photos from his collection (the Burns Archive, containing over 300,000 photographs), and a photographer from New York Magazine was scheduled to photograph him the next morning for an upcoming article, but he had a tradition of having a portrait made of himself, his son and his daughter every five years on November the first, and if I would agree to make the family portrait, I could begin the grid-portrait also.
It seems paradoxical that a man who is operating on overdrive and rarely gets more than 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night would title his book “Sleeping Beauty,” but this book of historic photos of death scenes had sold out its first and second printings, and he had just published the second volume, “Sleeping Beauty II.”
This portrait was made in three parts of his home – along a wall of daguerrotypes, in front of mock-ups of the new books, and in front of the wall of photos of medical curiosities.
Mary Baskett
Curator
Cincinnati, Ohio 2004
When I was introduced to Mary Baskett, I was immediately smitten by her porch. Her home is one of the oldest in the Mount Adams section of Cincinnati, a hilly area overlooking the Ohio River. She had been a curator of Asian art at the Cincinnati Art Museum, but now was a private dealer of Asian art. As I showed her a portrait of Gordon Gilkey, a curator at the Portland Art Museum whom she knew, I realized that Mary had to be one of my next portrait subjects.
Both she and her home are works of art, from the eccentric stairway leading to the Belvedere (with another view of the River) to the extensive designer wardrobe that is part of her regular attire, to the Rug Rats wristwatch that she prizes.
Mary Baskett wardrobe:
Shibori (tie-dye)
Issey Miyake Balloon dress and gloves
Comme des Garcons Shirt and skirt
Straw Hat: Stephen Jones for Comme des Garcons
120° in the Shade,
or
The Place Where It All Began
Escalante, Utah 1989
This vast amphitheater in the Escalante, Utah area is two hundred yards long and seemed too large to be conventionally photographed. I remembered David Hockney’s photo-collages and thought I might try a similar technique, but using 4”x5” images meant to be contact printed together to convey the idea of a single image. The first attempt was an utter failure but I went back three years later and successfully made the image. Each section was exposed at the time of day I thought the light was most interesting for it.