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July 2016
Interview William Lesch Tucson |
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William (Bill) Lesch
William (Bill) Lesch describes photography as the language he speaks. He has a BFA from the University of Arizona, and served as the first staff photographer for the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. He is an outdoorsman who is deeply involved in documenting nature. In this interview, he describes his work, especially his aerial photography of landscapes disrupted by mining.
SAN: Bill, your website bio says you grew up in Indiana. What was your childhood like that you were able to develop such a meaningful and close relationship to the natural world?
Bill: I would say the one thing that had the most effect was Lake Wawasee. It is a lake in Northern Indiana, the largest natural lake in the state. We had a cottage up there every summer going back generations. My grandparents went there, my mom as a child, and then my parents took their children. I have memories of the lake going back forever, my first summer up there I would have been one year old exactly. I was born in July, and we always went to the lake in July. Sunlight on the water, the feel of hot sand on my feet, laying on the pier looking up at the clouds and hearing the soft slapping of the waves hitting the pier, storms coming across the lake, sunsets over the lake (our cottage faced west), sunlight reflected off the lake streaming in the front windows, so many memories so deeply embedded in me.
Then later on exploring the swamps on the edges of the lake in our fishing boat as a kid, walking around all summer barefoot and tan. My hair would bleach almost blond in the summer and I tanned very dark, was short for my age, and in pictures from then I was like a little brown bean all summer long. I just remember the days seemed to stretch out forever. Time didn’t mean anything at that age. And in the summer I was outdoors as much as possible, catching turtles, catfish, zoning out watching the reflections of sunlight streaming off my hands as I would turn in circles in the Lake.
As I got older I joined Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts, and my parents would send me to camp in the summers too, just plain spent a lot of time learning about and being outdoors. But the lake was the place for me, became like a talisman or something. I still have a very deep relationship to it, go back every summer, am getting ready to go right now in fact, will be there from July 3rd to the 21st, celebrating my 65th birthday up there among other things.
The things around the lake have changed. It is busier with bigger boats and jet skis that didn’t exist when I was a kid. The cottages that used to be all the same size and just simple wooden summer cottages have turned into trophy homes for the rich. Ours is one of the only old-style ones left out of over 200 around the lake, but the lake itself is still the same lake, just a bit older, like me. It will be there long after I and all the McMansions and their stupid owners are gone, and that gives me comfort. The land will outlive our stupid use of it, and is beginning to pay us back for our ignorant ways, which also gives me comfort. But it saddens me that my children are paying the price for those who went before them. Getting off track, I still love the lake and look forward to being there every summer. It was where I took my first photographs in the early 70’s, and I work there every year, always have and always will.
SAN: What are your thoughts on a generation of children who spend more time staring at screens than they do building mud pies in a creek?
Bill: My thoughts about that are not good. Luckily I taught my kids to make mud pies and they spent most of their childhood doing stuff like that. We kept the tv off as much as we could and didn’t have computers around until they were into their teens. I don’t think they feel they missed out on anything. Their friends had video games and eventually they did too, but they never spent hours and hours in front of them. I have to think all the hours I spent with them taking them camping and kayaking and back to the lake every summer and up in the mountains or kayaking in Colorado or along the coast in Mexico. All that stuff made video games seem like pale stuff by comparison.
Both my sons are in their thirties now and they tell me how much they appreciate all the stuff I did with them when they were kids, how hardly any of their friends had parents who took them camping or to Tanque Verde for the day. I specifically made it a point to do stuff with them. I was still a kid at heart myself, and I probably passed a lot of opportunities to get further along in my “career” because I was up at the Salt [River] kayaking with my sons or took them out of school to Mexico for a week along the coast. They would make whole villages in the sand, excavating rivers, building mountains, and meanwhile I would be wandering around photographing fish skeletons or caves along the cliffs. Having the time to just let your mind and body wander, with nowhere to be and nothing having to be done, to me that sort of time is so, so important. Kids who grow up looking at screens are missing out on so much of life. They will never get back that sort of child-like wonder, those impressionable years when your mind is still forming. You need the input of stuff that is not man, not people, but the ocean, or a creek, the weather, change, being too hot or too cold, the textures of mud and stone and grass. All you get from a screen is manmade, the world as we try to make it, never the world as it really is. I think we will end up as a world of robots, everyone will welcome AI when it shows up because they’ve already been living in that world their whole lives.
SAN: Bill, your website bio says you grew up in Indiana. What was your childhood like that you were able to develop such a meaningful and close relationship to the natural world?
Bill: I would say the one thing that had the most effect was Lake Wawasee. It is a lake in Northern Indiana, the largest natural lake in the state. We had a cottage up there every summer going back generations. My grandparents went there, my mom as a child, and then my parents took their children. I have memories of the lake going back forever, my first summer up there I would have been one year old exactly. I was born in July, and we always went to the lake in July. Sunlight on the water, the feel of hot sand on my feet, laying on the pier looking up at the clouds and hearing the soft slapping of the waves hitting the pier, storms coming across the lake, sunsets over the lake (our cottage faced west), sunlight reflected off the lake streaming in the front windows, so many memories so deeply embedded in me.
Then later on exploring the swamps on the edges of the lake in our fishing boat as a kid, walking around all summer barefoot and tan. My hair would bleach almost blond in the summer and I tanned very dark, was short for my age, and in pictures from then I was like a little brown bean all summer long. I just remember the days seemed to stretch out forever. Time didn’t mean anything at that age. And in the summer I was outdoors as much as possible, catching turtles, catfish, zoning out watching the reflections of sunlight streaming off my hands as I would turn in circles in the Lake.
As I got older I joined Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts, and my parents would send me to camp in the summers too, just plain spent a lot of time learning about and being outdoors. But the lake was the place for me, became like a talisman or something. I still have a very deep relationship to it, go back every summer, am getting ready to go right now in fact, will be there from July 3rd to the 21st, celebrating my 65th birthday up there among other things.
The things around the lake have changed. It is busier with bigger boats and jet skis that didn’t exist when I was a kid. The cottages that used to be all the same size and just simple wooden summer cottages have turned into trophy homes for the rich. Ours is one of the only old-style ones left out of over 200 around the lake, but the lake itself is still the same lake, just a bit older, like me. It will be there long after I and all the McMansions and their stupid owners are gone, and that gives me comfort. The land will outlive our stupid use of it, and is beginning to pay us back for our ignorant ways, which also gives me comfort. But it saddens me that my children are paying the price for those who went before them. Getting off track, I still love the lake and look forward to being there every summer. It was where I took my first photographs in the early 70’s, and I work there every year, always have and always will.
SAN: What are your thoughts on a generation of children who spend more time staring at screens than they do building mud pies in a creek?
Bill: My thoughts about that are not good. Luckily I taught my kids to make mud pies and they spent most of their childhood doing stuff like that. We kept the tv off as much as we could and didn’t have computers around until they were into their teens. I don’t think they feel they missed out on anything. Their friends had video games and eventually they did too, but they never spent hours and hours in front of them. I have to think all the hours I spent with them taking them camping and kayaking and back to the lake every summer and up in the mountains or kayaking in Colorado or along the coast in Mexico. All that stuff made video games seem like pale stuff by comparison.
Both my sons are in their thirties now and they tell me how much they appreciate all the stuff I did with them when they were kids, how hardly any of their friends had parents who took them camping or to Tanque Verde for the day. I specifically made it a point to do stuff with them. I was still a kid at heart myself, and I probably passed a lot of opportunities to get further along in my “career” because I was up at the Salt [River] kayaking with my sons or took them out of school to Mexico for a week along the coast. They would make whole villages in the sand, excavating rivers, building mountains, and meanwhile I would be wandering around photographing fish skeletons or caves along the cliffs. Having the time to just let your mind and body wander, with nowhere to be and nothing having to be done, to me that sort of time is so, so important. Kids who grow up looking at screens are missing out on so much of life. They will never get back that sort of child-like wonder, those impressionable years when your mind is still forming. You need the input of stuff that is not man, not people, but the ocean, or a creek, the weather, change, being too hot or too cold, the textures of mud and stone and grass. All you get from a screen is manmade, the world as we try to make it, never the world as it really is. I think we will end up as a world of robots, everyone will welcome AI when it shows up because they’ve already been living in that world their whole lives.
WLesch_Ray Mine Montage 6_
SAN: You started college in pre-med but you found your true path in life when you took an elective course in photography. You ended up earning a BFA in photography. What was that first experience of photography like for you to make such a major life change?
Bill: It was actually a film course. I was at Xavier University then, in Cincinnati, on a four year academic scholarship (I got pretty good grades in high school, despite myself somehow). Anyway, I recall distinctly one day in zoology class we were studying human biology and there was an actual skeleton in the front of class. We were memorizing the bones. The professor was pointing at them with a long wooden stick and going around the class and we would have to say them and doing it really fast and he was like whacking the skeleton almost. I remember thinking hey, that was a human being, still is in a sense, and you’re treating it like a piece of plastic or wood. It was an attitude that permeated the study of science. Total objectivity I guess it could be called, but when we started studying the human body it just turned me off totally.
So I was signing up for elective classes and my girlfriend at the time was an artist and was studying art at the University of Cincinnati so I had been introduced to it through her, been to museums and had my first experiences with having a work of art just knock me over – but not photography yet. I remember seeing a Rodin at the museum in Atlanta and practically crying it was so beautiful but I can’t recall which one it was, and a Picasso that was there too, one of his early ones.
So I knew what art could do but I never considered then that I could be an artist. I thought artists were people like my girlfriend who could draw anything and it would look like whatever it was she was drawing – like you had to be born an artist and I was not, but anyway I signed up for this film course at Xavier, the closest thing they had to an art class there. The first semester we watched all the classic art films, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Kubrick – I loved it, had never seen most of those films before and the Bergmans, the black and white just blew me away.
Then the second semester we got to make our own films using super 8. They taught us how to cut and splice them. That was how you did it. And for my project I made this totally predictable film that had cuts of the inner city and down and out bums and traffic and city stuff like that. Then I cut those shots with ones from out in the woods and along a river, wind blowing in the fields, stuff like that. I cut back and forth between them with quick cuts – the whole thing was synced to the Beatles “Day in the Life.” So the song builds to this crescendo and I had shots of this train bearing down that were intercut as well and it keeps getting closer and then with the final chord in the song where it builds and then just fades out. I had the train barrel down right on top of us and then cut to a slow pan of a foggy, very old cemetery. See, I told you it was totally corny – but the thing was the timing of the music and the cuts came out perfect, and everyone in class was blown away and they all applauded. Man I was hooked, line and sinker.
So I switched schools to University of Cincinnati in its graphic design program because it had photography classes. That was the closest thing I could find in Cincinnati to film. Then I got hooked on photography once I started developing my own film and realizing I could do this myself, didn’t need a whole production company like film needed back then. I started looking at photography too, mainly in books but they had a good art library at UC, and discovered Meatyard’s work [Ralph Eugene Meatyard]. Here he was doing work in Kentucky, almost right around the corner and shooting his kids and friends which was sort of what I had started doing, taking pictures up at the lake. Then I discovered Weston and Adams and the whole Cali thing, got myself a 4x5 and learned how to use it, and moved West when I was 22. Dropped out of the graphic design thing I was in to move West. I knew I wanted to be a photographer not a graphic designer. I had gotten everything I could out of that school. I think my parents wondered what the hell I was up to, lost a four year free ride in pre med to chase photography, then quit the other school before graduating to pack everything into my VW bug and head west – I credit them with letting me follow my heart instead of pushing me into something I would never have been happy with.
SAN: You have made some quite philosophical comments regarding your photographic process. You have said that you “look for the seams, the chinks in the wall of what we think the world looks like.” Is it your hope to shake things up in the eye and mind of the viewer so that s/he sees the natural world as it truly is, rather than as a collection of human assumptions and typifications?
Bill: Definitely – you said it right there. What I have always been struggling to see is the world as it looked to us when we were one, maybe two, before we knew the names to everything and before we start closing off our perception because it overloads our mind. The stuff about the seams in reality comes partially from experience and also partly from Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s actually not totally from her, it was from an account of a woman who had eye surgery when they first discovered how to fix cataracts, and it was about what people who had been blind from birth, what they felt or described when they saw for the first time. She quotes one woman as seeing “the tree with the lights in it” – seeing a tree with the leaves blowing in the sunlight and not knowing it as a tree and leaves and all the names we have but just experiencing it as light and forms and color. And Dillard takes that as a metaphor for seeing and describes how she has spent her lifetime trying to see the world as it is. Then one day she is just walking through her backyard and suddenly sees the tree before her transformed, as if seeing it for the first time.
Maybe what I have experienced is not exactly the same, but it’s close enough. There have been three or four times in my life, maybe half a dozen. I can hold the images in my mind still: once at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, another time up along a creek on Mt. Lemmon where I used to go a lot, another time way out on a Point at the end of Point Lobos, another time when I almost died paralyzed face down in the ocean. But I was seeing the ocean floor in that instant as it really was. And all those times, it was like time stopped and stood still and for a moment or an eternity I just was, same as a rock or the motes of dust floating on the breeze. My thinking mind disappeared. I disappeared for a moment. Somehow I think it’s what heaven must be like, or maybe whatever it’s called where we were before we got here. It’s the same way that Dillard says that moment when that happens is what she lives for, when the mountains slam. I know what she means and it’s what I live for as well. If I can ever get even a fraction of that into one of my photographs then I will have accomplished what I was meant to do while I am here. I think all of us have something like that we are meant to do or be. Maybe it’s kayaking over insane waterfalls or writing a novel or doing a really difficult brain surgery or maybe it’s just cooking a fantastic, perfect meal. It can be anything we do where we lose ourselves, our ambition, our need for recognition, whatever, and just do something for the sheer beauty of doing it as perfectly as we can. Something like that is what I’m up to, though mostly it’s much more mundane stuff.
Bill: It was actually a film course. I was at Xavier University then, in Cincinnati, on a four year academic scholarship (I got pretty good grades in high school, despite myself somehow). Anyway, I recall distinctly one day in zoology class we were studying human biology and there was an actual skeleton in the front of class. We were memorizing the bones. The professor was pointing at them with a long wooden stick and going around the class and we would have to say them and doing it really fast and he was like whacking the skeleton almost. I remember thinking hey, that was a human being, still is in a sense, and you’re treating it like a piece of plastic or wood. It was an attitude that permeated the study of science. Total objectivity I guess it could be called, but when we started studying the human body it just turned me off totally.
So I was signing up for elective classes and my girlfriend at the time was an artist and was studying art at the University of Cincinnati so I had been introduced to it through her, been to museums and had my first experiences with having a work of art just knock me over – but not photography yet. I remember seeing a Rodin at the museum in Atlanta and practically crying it was so beautiful but I can’t recall which one it was, and a Picasso that was there too, one of his early ones.
So I knew what art could do but I never considered then that I could be an artist. I thought artists were people like my girlfriend who could draw anything and it would look like whatever it was she was drawing – like you had to be born an artist and I was not, but anyway I signed up for this film course at Xavier, the closest thing they had to an art class there. The first semester we watched all the classic art films, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Kubrick – I loved it, had never seen most of those films before and the Bergmans, the black and white just blew me away.
Then the second semester we got to make our own films using super 8. They taught us how to cut and splice them. That was how you did it. And for my project I made this totally predictable film that had cuts of the inner city and down and out bums and traffic and city stuff like that. Then I cut those shots with ones from out in the woods and along a river, wind blowing in the fields, stuff like that. I cut back and forth between them with quick cuts – the whole thing was synced to the Beatles “Day in the Life.” So the song builds to this crescendo and I had shots of this train bearing down that were intercut as well and it keeps getting closer and then with the final chord in the song where it builds and then just fades out. I had the train barrel down right on top of us and then cut to a slow pan of a foggy, very old cemetery. See, I told you it was totally corny – but the thing was the timing of the music and the cuts came out perfect, and everyone in class was blown away and they all applauded. Man I was hooked, line and sinker.
So I switched schools to University of Cincinnati in its graphic design program because it had photography classes. That was the closest thing I could find in Cincinnati to film. Then I got hooked on photography once I started developing my own film and realizing I could do this myself, didn’t need a whole production company like film needed back then. I started looking at photography too, mainly in books but they had a good art library at UC, and discovered Meatyard’s work [Ralph Eugene Meatyard]. Here he was doing work in Kentucky, almost right around the corner and shooting his kids and friends which was sort of what I had started doing, taking pictures up at the lake. Then I discovered Weston and Adams and the whole Cali thing, got myself a 4x5 and learned how to use it, and moved West when I was 22. Dropped out of the graphic design thing I was in to move West. I knew I wanted to be a photographer not a graphic designer. I had gotten everything I could out of that school. I think my parents wondered what the hell I was up to, lost a four year free ride in pre med to chase photography, then quit the other school before graduating to pack everything into my VW bug and head west – I credit them with letting me follow my heart instead of pushing me into something I would never have been happy with.
SAN: You have made some quite philosophical comments regarding your photographic process. You have said that you “look for the seams, the chinks in the wall of what we think the world looks like.” Is it your hope to shake things up in the eye and mind of the viewer so that s/he sees the natural world as it truly is, rather than as a collection of human assumptions and typifications?
Bill: Definitely – you said it right there. What I have always been struggling to see is the world as it looked to us when we were one, maybe two, before we knew the names to everything and before we start closing off our perception because it overloads our mind. The stuff about the seams in reality comes partially from experience and also partly from Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s actually not totally from her, it was from an account of a woman who had eye surgery when they first discovered how to fix cataracts, and it was about what people who had been blind from birth, what they felt or described when they saw for the first time. She quotes one woman as seeing “the tree with the lights in it” – seeing a tree with the leaves blowing in the sunlight and not knowing it as a tree and leaves and all the names we have but just experiencing it as light and forms and color. And Dillard takes that as a metaphor for seeing and describes how she has spent her lifetime trying to see the world as it is. Then one day she is just walking through her backyard and suddenly sees the tree before her transformed, as if seeing it for the first time.
Maybe what I have experienced is not exactly the same, but it’s close enough. There have been three or four times in my life, maybe half a dozen. I can hold the images in my mind still: once at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, another time up along a creek on Mt. Lemmon where I used to go a lot, another time way out on a Point at the end of Point Lobos, another time when I almost died paralyzed face down in the ocean. But I was seeing the ocean floor in that instant as it really was. And all those times, it was like time stopped and stood still and for a moment or an eternity I just was, same as a rock or the motes of dust floating on the breeze. My thinking mind disappeared. I disappeared for a moment. Somehow I think it’s what heaven must be like, or maybe whatever it’s called where we were before we got here. It’s the same way that Dillard says that moment when that happens is what she lives for, when the mountains slam. I know what she means and it’s what I live for as well. If I can ever get even a fraction of that into one of my photographs then I will have accomplished what I was meant to do while I am here. I think all of us have something like that we are meant to do or be. Maybe it’s kayaking over insane waterfalls or writing a novel or doing a really difficult brain surgery or maybe it’s just cooking a fantastic, perfect meal. It can be anything we do where we lose ourselves, our ambition, our need for recognition, whatever, and just do something for the sheer beauty of doing it as perfectly as we can. Something like that is what I’m up to, though mostly it’s much more mundane stuff.
WLesch_Ray Mine Montage 10_
SAN: You have some very impressive photography portfolios of the natural world on your website categorized as Cloud, Desert, Canyon, Earth, Water, Flora. Regarding the Earth portfolio, you exhibited some of your aerial photos of surface mines in Arizona in a recent exhibit at Tohono Chul. This series is especially colorful and compelling, and yet rather horrifying when we realize what we are seeing. You have described these aerial photos as “like abstract paintings thrown onto the earth.” Was it your intent to create a tension between beauty and destruction in the mind of the viewer? Or is there something very direct about the colorful abstract image alone that attracted you to its merits?
Bill: Both of those things. I came to take the aerials in a rather roundabout way. I had been a fan of the work of Emmett Gowin since my early days. His work was not only very important to me and connected to me on a very deep level, but the way he lived his life, the way he integrated art into his life seemed like a signpost to me as a young man. He was a strong influence on my early work. In the 80’s he began doing aerial work, first of Mt. St Helen’s and later of mines and bombing sites in Nevada. His work was very much about that tension between beauty and destruction, and he wrote at length about it in some of his essays. I had read them and had seen his photographs but I didn’t know anything about aerial photography and didn’t have money laying around to hire a plane and a pilot. I thought, well, there is one area of Emmet’s work that I will never try on my own.
Then in high school my younger son became interested in learning to fly and we found a magnet school that had an aviation program and he got his pilot’s license in 2001 and of course I had to go up with him and of course I took a camera along. And since the flight paths out of TIA go right over the mines, I got a look at what Emmet had been photographing. The thing was, he had always shot his aerials in black and white so I had never seen them in color. They said something totally different to me in color. I began working on shooting them. I would try to shoot on cloudy days or in the half hour of low light right around sunset when you can see the patterns and colors at their richest and all laid out like a map or an abstract painting. I thought of them as pieces of a puzzle, different shapes and colors that I could mix into my own interpretation of a mine. Of course I was influenced by Emmet’s work.
Then I came across the work of David Maisel who had been one of Emmet’s students and who photographed them in color. But in looking at the way each of us shoot them and many other photographers who shoot them, I think each one has their own way of seeing the same things. It’s no different than the various ways people see waterfalls or clouds of most anything. It is impossible when seeing them to ignore the fact of how much we have imposed our will upon the earth, cut and sliced in open like a corpse. In fact, one project I want to do at some point is get into a surgical lab or medical school and take pictures of body parts or surgical procedures or even corpses after autopsies or perhaps microscopic photos. Not really sure what, but I expect on some level I would find visually similar structures and colors in the human body. I would like to digitally combine those photos into montages with the photos of the mines - a sort of metaphor of how we have mangled the body of the earth just as our food and way of living has mangled our own bodies. It’s all of a piece. Whether or not I can gain access to photograph dead bodies or livers or whatever I’m not sure. I guess if I had been a surgeon like I wanted in high school I could have my pick of them. Something will turn up, I’m in no hurry.
SAN: You have written of these surface mine photos. “They [are] like road maps of our way of life, the results of the decisions we had made to extract these minerals for our steel and copper, and in their own way they were huge abstract earth sculptures, the sculpture of our time displayed upon the canvas of the earth.” Do you view yourself as an artist dedicated to documenting these “road maps.” Or are you seeking something beyond documentation?
Bill: As I said above, documenting them is the least of my intents. Most of them are montaged from many different photos, sometimes from totally different mines. So their value as documentary photography is zero. They are not “truthful” documents, but then I don’t believe anything ever is. You want to see an example of that, look at photos of mines and other similar industrial photos from the 1950’s. Compare those to photos of the exact same things by Burtynsky [Edward Burtynsky]. Those photos from the 50’s were just as accurate a rendition and Burtynsky’s work, but what they had to say about it was almost the exact opposite. A documentary photograph says whatever the photographer was trying to say. About the only way to get a totally objective documentary photograph would be to tie a camera to a cow and set it to go off every five minutes, but then it would depend on which side of the cow you put the camera.
SAN: What are you working on now?
Bill:
1. Photographs of cross sections of dead saguaro arms, dead barrel cactus, decaying prickly pear pads, and other things like that I find in the desert.
2. A long term project photographing in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, four or five different sub-series contained within that work.
3. A long term project photographing time exposures of breaking waves and tide pools shooting straight down on them from cliffs – sort of like aerials in a way.
4. Photographing redwoods in northern California, primarily the upturned roots of them after they fall to the ground and also the hollowed out inner shells left by storm damage.
5. Photographing the bottom sides of decaying lily pads in the Midwest in swamps.
6. Time exposures of wind in trees and fields on extremely windy days, a series started when I was in my 20’s.
7. A long term project of time exposures of moving clouds.
8. A long term project doing time lapse landscape photographs where I set a tripod out in the landscape and leave it there for several days or weeks and take hundreds of exposures in varying light and then combine them into one or several montaged time-pieces.
9. A series of multiple exposure portraits and self-portraits in the landscape where the figure breaks down and by seeing through the figure to the landscape behind it.
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head that are series I have started work on and that are in various stages, I wouldn’t say stages of completion because I don’t’ work that way. I expect to be working on all these series plus probably half a dozen more and still be working on them till the day I die. They’re not like novels, and I’ve never had a series I started yet that I feel like is done, they just evolve into something else. Like the light painting work I did in the 80’s has evolved into the time lapse landscapes I do now, but I sometimes throw in a little light painting to the mix when doing those.
I am experimenting with printing the mine images on actual copper sheets. I have some new coating products that allow me to put a white gesso coating, or a clear coating for that matter, on about any type of material - wood, metal, plastic, glass, and as long as that material is thin enough and flat enough I can run it through my printer and print on it. If coated carefully with the gesso, the area coated with a white ground prints nearly identical to the prints I make on paper as far as the depth of color, detail, etc. except for a slight awareness of texture from the gesso coating, which I like quite a bit.
My plan is to mask off a border of copper all around the edge of the image and then to use various things to eat through the image to the copper underneath. Some of these might be using chemicals, acids, other liquids that would react with the copper in much the same way the chemicals the miners use react with the earth to create the copper. I would be looking for things that might leave marks, colors, patterns, etc. in the print that have a resonance with the marks and colors of the image. It might involve grinding or sanding through the image in selected areas to get to the copper, pounding or bending the copper sheet, whatever. I plan to try lots of things on them.
I've already been trying to give them a sense of being a object with weight and texture rather than a window as a photograph often is, something that has no substance at all but is a photograph of something else. I want them to be objects, like a painting is an object, or a wooden door. Maybe they will become copper doors into a better understanding of what mining is, of the activity we are involved in when we dig in the earth and refine it into the end products of mining. I like the complexity of all the issues involved, all the way from the environmental consequences of the manner in which we do it to the sheer beauty of the refined copper - its depth and luminosity. The precious metals are precious for a reason. Are they worth what we go through to get them? Maybe that is a question I want the viewers to ask. I'm not sure myself.
My son is a glassworker and makes beautiful things using gold inside the heated glass. I'm also experimenting with orotone printing using gold leaf. The prints are amazingly luminous and beautiful, but the process of getting gold out of the ground is even more destructive and ravaging to the earth. Interesting to me. I'm not sure if I dreamed this or what - but I have this concept in my head that I had heard about a tribe or community of people somewhere in the world whose village sits on top of a deposit of gold. Over centuries they have mined this gold but done it as a village, communally, and only taken enough gold out of the ground to help provide for their needs which are very modest. No one is trying to get rich from the gold. In fact they have an agreement that no one person can do that. The gold belongs to the community. They take it out of the ground simply, with hand tools, picks and shovels or gold pans or whatever, in other words it is what could be called sustainable mining.
I have no idea where I came across this, and I can find no reference to anything like that by googling, so perhaps I dreamed it years ago - but I love the image in my head. Totally idealistic and unworkable. Some asshole would come along and try to take it all and get rich quick. But if our society could learn something like that it could apply to everything we do, peace on earth, hah. What a dreamer. Guess that's our job as artists.
See more of Bill Lesch’s work at WilliamLesch.com
Bill: Both of those things. I came to take the aerials in a rather roundabout way. I had been a fan of the work of Emmett Gowin since my early days. His work was not only very important to me and connected to me on a very deep level, but the way he lived his life, the way he integrated art into his life seemed like a signpost to me as a young man. He was a strong influence on my early work. In the 80’s he began doing aerial work, first of Mt. St Helen’s and later of mines and bombing sites in Nevada. His work was very much about that tension between beauty and destruction, and he wrote at length about it in some of his essays. I had read them and had seen his photographs but I didn’t know anything about aerial photography and didn’t have money laying around to hire a plane and a pilot. I thought, well, there is one area of Emmet’s work that I will never try on my own.
Then in high school my younger son became interested in learning to fly and we found a magnet school that had an aviation program and he got his pilot’s license in 2001 and of course I had to go up with him and of course I took a camera along. And since the flight paths out of TIA go right over the mines, I got a look at what Emmet had been photographing. The thing was, he had always shot his aerials in black and white so I had never seen them in color. They said something totally different to me in color. I began working on shooting them. I would try to shoot on cloudy days or in the half hour of low light right around sunset when you can see the patterns and colors at their richest and all laid out like a map or an abstract painting. I thought of them as pieces of a puzzle, different shapes and colors that I could mix into my own interpretation of a mine. Of course I was influenced by Emmet’s work.
Then I came across the work of David Maisel who had been one of Emmet’s students and who photographed them in color. But in looking at the way each of us shoot them and many other photographers who shoot them, I think each one has their own way of seeing the same things. It’s no different than the various ways people see waterfalls or clouds of most anything. It is impossible when seeing them to ignore the fact of how much we have imposed our will upon the earth, cut and sliced in open like a corpse. In fact, one project I want to do at some point is get into a surgical lab or medical school and take pictures of body parts or surgical procedures or even corpses after autopsies or perhaps microscopic photos. Not really sure what, but I expect on some level I would find visually similar structures and colors in the human body. I would like to digitally combine those photos into montages with the photos of the mines - a sort of metaphor of how we have mangled the body of the earth just as our food and way of living has mangled our own bodies. It’s all of a piece. Whether or not I can gain access to photograph dead bodies or livers or whatever I’m not sure. I guess if I had been a surgeon like I wanted in high school I could have my pick of them. Something will turn up, I’m in no hurry.
SAN: You have written of these surface mine photos. “They [are] like road maps of our way of life, the results of the decisions we had made to extract these minerals for our steel and copper, and in their own way they were huge abstract earth sculptures, the sculpture of our time displayed upon the canvas of the earth.” Do you view yourself as an artist dedicated to documenting these “road maps.” Or are you seeking something beyond documentation?
Bill: As I said above, documenting them is the least of my intents. Most of them are montaged from many different photos, sometimes from totally different mines. So their value as documentary photography is zero. They are not “truthful” documents, but then I don’t believe anything ever is. You want to see an example of that, look at photos of mines and other similar industrial photos from the 1950’s. Compare those to photos of the exact same things by Burtynsky [Edward Burtynsky]. Those photos from the 50’s were just as accurate a rendition and Burtynsky’s work, but what they had to say about it was almost the exact opposite. A documentary photograph says whatever the photographer was trying to say. About the only way to get a totally objective documentary photograph would be to tie a camera to a cow and set it to go off every five minutes, but then it would depend on which side of the cow you put the camera.
SAN: What are you working on now?
Bill:
1. Photographs of cross sections of dead saguaro arms, dead barrel cactus, decaying prickly pear pads, and other things like that I find in the desert.
2. A long term project photographing in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, four or five different sub-series contained within that work.
3. A long term project photographing time exposures of breaking waves and tide pools shooting straight down on them from cliffs – sort of like aerials in a way.
4. Photographing redwoods in northern California, primarily the upturned roots of them after they fall to the ground and also the hollowed out inner shells left by storm damage.
5. Photographing the bottom sides of decaying lily pads in the Midwest in swamps.
6. Time exposures of wind in trees and fields on extremely windy days, a series started when I was in my 20’s.
7. A long term project of time exposures of moving clouds.
8. A long term project doing time lapse landscape photographs where I set a tripod out in the landscape and leave it there for several days or weeks and take hundreds of exposures in varying light and then combine them into one or several montaged time-pieces.
9. A series of multiple exposure portraits and self-portraits in the landscape where the figure breaks down and by seeing through the figure to the landscape behind it.
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head that are series I have started work on and that are in various stages, I wouldn’t say stages of completion because I don’t’ work that way. I expect to be working on all these series plus probably half a dozen more and still be working on them till the day I die. They’re not like novels, and I’ve never had a series I started yet that I feel like is done, they just evolve into something else. Like the light painting work I did in the 80’s has evolved into the time lapse landscapes I do now, but I sometimes throw in a little light painting to the mix when doing those.
I am experimenting with printing the mine images on actual copper sheets. I have some new coating products that allow me to put a white gesso coating, or a clear coating for that matter, on about any type of material - wood, metal, plastic, glass, and as long as that material is thin enough and flat enough I can run it through my printer and print on it. If coated carefully with the gesso, the area coated with a white ground prints nearly identical to the prints I make on paper as far as the depth of color, detail, etc. except for a slight awareness of texture from the gesso coating, which I like quite a bit.
My plan is to mask off a border of copper all around the edge of the image and then to use various things to eat through the image to the copper underneath. Some of these might be using chemicals, acids, other liquids that would react with the copper in much the same way the chemicals the miners use react with the earth to create the copper. I would be looking for things that might leave marks, colors, patterns, etc. in the print that have a resonance with the marks and colors of the image. It might involve grinding or sanding through the image in selected areas to get to the copper, pounding or bending the copper sheet, whatever. I plan to try lots of things on them.
I've already been trying to give them a sense of being a object with weight and texture rather than a window as a photograph often is, something that has no substance at all but is a photograph of something else. I want them to be objects, like a painting is an object, or a wooden door. Maybe they will become copper doors into a better understanding of what mining is, of the activity we are involved in when we dig in the earth and refine it into the end products of mining. I like the complexity of all the issues involved, all the way from the environmental consequences of the manner in which we do it to the sheer beauty of the refined copper - its depth and luminosity. The precious metals are precious for a reason. Are they worth what we go through to get them? Maybe that is a question I want the viewers to ask. I'm not sure myself.
My son is a glassworker and makes beautiful things using gold inside the heated glass. I'm also experimenting with orotone printing using gold leaf. The prints are amazingly luminous and beautiful, but the process of getting gold out of the ground is even more destructive and ravaging to the earth. Interesting to me. I'm not sure if I dreamed this or what - but I have this concept in my head that I had heard about a tribe or community of people somewhere in the world whose village sits on top of a deposit of gold. Over centuries they have mined this gold but done it as a village, communally, and only taken enough gold out of the ground to help provide for their needs which are very modest. No one is trying to get rich from the gold. In fact they have an agreement that no one person can do that. The gold belongs to the community. They take it out of the ground simply, with hand tools, picks and shovels or gold pans or whatever, in other words it is what could be called sustainable mining.
I have no idea where I came across this, and I can find no reference to anything like that by googling, so perhaps I dreamed it years ago - but I love the image in my head. Totally idealistic and unworkable. Some asshole would come along and try to take it all and get rich quick. But if our society could learn something like that it could apply to everything we do, peace on earth, hah. What a dreamer. Guess that's our job as artists.
See more of Bill Lesch’s work at WilliamLesch.com
