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,

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.

6 x T2

Terry Toedtemeier

Portland, Oregon 1986

The first successful image of the series occurred when I photographed a bridge in the Columbia River Gorge and asked a friend and fellow photographer known for his work in the Columbia River Gorge, Terry Toedtemeier, who was with me, to be in the image. First I photographed his face, then as I photographed his torso I had him hold up a Polaroid print of the first image of his face. As I scanned the camera to photograph an adjacent section of the bridge, I asked him to move and be in a different area of the image. All of a sudden I realized the possibilities if showing more than one aspect of someone in a portrait and thus began this series.

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.

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.

Lillian Pitt

Unmasked

Artist

Portland, Oregon 1993

Lillian Pitt is a Native American of the Warm Springs tribe, living in Portland, Oregon. One of her best known ceramic masks is of a Columbia Gorge petroglyph called She Who Watches, which may have been made by Lillian’s ancestors several thousand years ago. Her studio contains work by many of her artist friends, and is surrounded by a “graveyard” of broken or imperfect masks. Her ceramics represent many of the mythical figures of her culture.

Gordon Gilkey

Artist, Curator

Portland, Oregon 1996

Gordon Gilkey’s accomplishments as an artist and educator are more extensive than I can keep track of, but the more I learn about him, the more I am amazed. As an artist and printmaker, he avidly collected and traded prints with seemingly everyone in the world and amassed a huge collection of prints. After retiring from Oregon State University as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, he and his wife donated their print collection to the Portland Art Museum where he became Curator of Prints and Drawings. He also taught printmaking at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. I only recently learned that at the end of World War II he helped locate and repatriate artwork which had been confiscated by the Nazis, often breaking through a freshly plastered wall in a villa to find a treasure trove of hidden art. This photograph was made in his printing lab, in his library at the Gilkey Study Center and in the print vault of the Portland Art Museum.

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 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.

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.

The Name’s Wilson, Michael Wilson

Bonding With Michael

London, 2011

Co-Starring:

The Wife – Jane Wilson

Bar Customer – Dennis Gassner

Bartender – Dr. Zone

I went to London in late November and early December 2011 to make a Grid-Portrait of Michael Wilson. After a 10 year on-and-off conversation, I was able to find a time to photograph him during the filming of a James Bond film (Michael is the co-producer, along with his sister Barbara Broccoli).

There are four parts to the photo:

1. In the entrance hall of his home with his wife, Jane

2. In the library of the Wilson Centre for Photography. Michael has a vast collection of photographs, both vintage historical works and major contemporary images. The photos on the wall behind him include a self-portrait by Outerbridge, a self-portrait by Edward Weston, and a Weston portrait of Tina Modotti.

3. The right side of the photo was made on the set of Skyfall (the 23rd James Bond Film) at the Pinewood Studios in London. The set is a simulated bar in Shanghai. The customer at the bar is Dennis Gassner, the academy award-winning Artistic Director of the film. He is a U of O alumnus (and former football player for the Ducks). I am the bar tender, serving him a martini (shaken, not stirred), wearing a replica of the hat worn by Odd Job in Goldfinger.

4. The border represents an animation sequence of a jellyfish which is briefly seen in the film as part of the Shanghai night skyline, as James Bond fights an assassin in a glass-walled high-rise office building.