About three years ago Lewis and a friend, Blaine England, made the back of a camper trailer into a light-tight box, stuck in a lens, and turned it into a camera. They named it, in goofy homage to the camera obscura or "dark room" of early photography, the "Campera Obscura."
Last year Lewis built another homemade camera--a 30-by-30-by-30-inch plywood box, part of which is painted, for no particular reason, purple. He calls this portrait camera the Cameron, which you're supposed to pronounce in a sort of Antonio Banderas accent so it sounds like "Big Camera." Each huge paper negative must be loaded individually. The exposure, usually around 20 seconds, is made by removing the lens cap. This process requires a sitter to remain still for 20 seconds and the photographer to look very deeply at his subject.
Last fall, Lewis, a co-founder of Fotocircle, invited some of his friends to sit for him. He wanted to see what was most important to these people: who they were or could be, most essentially. With one exception, all the portraits in this exhibit show the subject looking directly at the photographer. Because of how the people look at Lewis, because of how thoroughly he looks at them, we viewers see them intimately.
One portrait is of a bald-headed woman, white, middle-aged, her chin slightly up. "That's Susan," says Lewis. "We were friends for about 10 years and when she got diagnosed with cancer last summer she asked me to document what she was going through.... She'd just gotten her head shaved right before this. She looks so proud with that bald head."
Most of the 30-by-30-inch paper is black, but the woman in the middle of it is light. It looks like light is shining down on her from somewhere above and to her right, but also like it's coming from inside of her. She looks like solid light, unmoving, entire, as if no one and nothing could ever diminish her.
In one of the portraits a guy looks like he's in some kind of Gypsy costume. "I knew Ned from a while ago," Lewis says. "He's been in and out of Seattle a lot, doing this nomadic thing. When he was back last fall he was always wearing that hat. His vest was given to him by one of his transient friends. Anyway, when I asked him to sit, he just struck this amazing pose on his own. His legs were like that to help him keep still, but then it turned into this really powerful, defiant posture. It was like in those clothes, sitting like that, he was acting most like himself."
Ned doesn't always dress like this, but how he chose to present himself for the camera reveals some true part of him. This image is of some essence of Ned-ness that would be manifest in any culture or time or place in which he lived.
Not all of these portraits are so decisive, though. In one portrait the subject is looking away from the viewer, down and at something he's holding close to him.
"That's Rob..." Lewis mumbles, careful not to reveal too much. "Those are flowers he's holding." This image, unlike the crisp, clean lines in Susan's and Ned's portraits, is fuzzy. Rob's facial features are blurred, as if he doesn't want anyone to see what he's thinking. Or maybe what he's thinking isn't clear to him. Maybe this is an image of nostalgia. Or of mourning. Maybe it's about solitude.
Like much of Lewis' work, this photograph feels like a painting. It is not meant to define or document, but to give a glimpse into an elusive, private world.
"This picture of Rob gave me some insights into Juliet Margaret Cameron. She may have started out wanting crisp, clear images, but I think she came to accept, then embrace, the fuzziness. You know her portrait of Herschel? That fuzziness gives it so much depth. It really says something about him."
In Cameron's 19th-century portrait of Herschel, the highly respected Victorian scientist looks half mad. He's got deep lines on his face and his long white hair is wild. Cameron's portrait is not of the scientist as patriarch or man of reason, but as visionary. It's not about visual clarity but psychological suggestion. That's what Lewis is after, too.
This spring, after having made his series of large-format portraits, Lewis decided to try some landscapes. He asked Jim Madara to help him build another mammoth camera. In a statement that accompanies the exhibit, Lewis describes this camera: "The Madaraflex--named after Jim Madara who was commissioned to build it--employs a flat-field, 19-inch process camera lens, and features a roll-back film advancing system. It is a 50-pound landscape camera, loaded with a 24-inch-by-100-foot roll of film that can be advanced frame by frame in the field."
So, though this camera doesn't require (like the Cameron does) that you load each paper negative individually, you do have to lug the thing around. To shoot a landscape, Lewis had to heave this mammoth, 50-plus-pound camera into his station wagon and drive, very carefully, to a site. There he had to find a stable place to set the thing. It's very labor-intensive to maneuver it to just the right place on the side of the hill, or beneath the bridge, or in the pile of rubble beneath the overpass he's going to shoot.
"The lens is focused on infinity," Lewis says. He means "infinity" in a technical, photo-manual sense: "Sharp focus starts at 70 feet from the camera and extends to infinity... everything closer will not be tack sharp." But Lewis' photographs also focus on infinity in a more metaphysical way. Because the Madaraflex throws a circular image into the 24-by-30-inch camera back, every landscape image is surrounded by a black circle. It looks like you're seeing through a keyhole, getting special access to a secret world. It looks like you're getting a ghost's-eye view of things. You're able to see far into the important long-range distance, while the accidents of what's on hand are less clear. In focusing on infinity, this camera lets the details of the fleeting present blur.
Most of the landscapes were shot around Seattle--Holgate, beneath Columbia Way, Coleman Park, the industrial Duwamish--places that don't move quickly. They feel quiet, like you're the only one there, alone, and for some strange reason, the way you do in a cathedral, you hold your breath. Their centers are eerily pristine, while just inside the black circle, small things blur. You wonder if you've just missed or are seeing something for the last time.
"I wanted to just do landscape," Lewis says, "but people kept coming back in." Not only the point of view but also the human subjects in some of these landscapes look ghostly. One of these landscapes is of a circular gravel path in a park. You can't see the start or the end of the path, but you see a guy walking alone along it. Is he just going around in circles or is he going somewhere? There's something de Chirico-like in this enclosed yet open-ended place with a man alone in it. In the foreground of the image is the end of a concrete square. Is it the end of a bench? The top of a step? A part of a fence? Suddenly you're aware of the viewer, who is there seeing--watching over?--the solitary walker. Only then do you notice the other, smaller path that goes from where the watcher is, perhaps from where you are, down into the main path. Who is the one observing here? Will the walker ever meet the one who watches him?
The sky above the park is absolutely white, like in those oddly, perfectly cloudless skies that hovered over Timothy O'Sullivan's late-19th-century landscapes of the West. This sky suggests a kind of stasis, a kind of permanent ongoing-ness before the vagaries of weather.
Rob in His Tree, one is titled. Your eye is led up the triangular center by strong verticals on either side. The composition is that of a classic, heroic landscape. But instead of using avenues of poplars or columns to lead your eye up, this image is bound on left and right by the backs of two modest one-story houses. You're looking not at an idyll, but at the scruffy space between two houses in a rundown neighborhood. When you look closer, you see the recycle bins leaning up against one house, the scattering of pots with scraggly dead plants, the busted pallets and wooden boxes rotting beneath the eaves. The fuzzy foreground is perhaps a crumpled plastic tarp, or maybe the top of the trash.
It takes you a while to find Rob: a face beneath a hat sitting in a tree. Is he surveying his little kingdom? Or is he trying to get away? His tree is in the center of the image, and very clear. But on the left of the image are other trees, and as they get farther from the center, they start to blur. They make it look windy. But Rob's own tree is frozen still, not subject to the natural laws of the world it should be part of. What world is he living in?
Richard Lewis' photographs are, like the 19th-century portraits of Juliet Margaret Cameron and the landscapes of Timothy O'Sullivan, suggestive of something beyond the individual identity of the sitter or the particularities of a place. Lewis' homemade cameras are, like those of William Henry Fox Talbot, the Englishman often credited with inventing photography, machines for looking. Lewis wants us to look more carefully at the stillness beneath the movement, at who we most essentially, privately are.
