Photographer Stu Levy Returns to Cincinnati for Artist Talk

Since growing up in Cincinnati, playing in a local groovy psych-rock band (Surdy-Greebus) in the late ’60s, attending medical school at the University of Cincinnati, then pursuing photography and eventually assisting the great landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Stu Levy’s renowned photographic work is calling him back to the Queen City.

On April 28, Levy will give an artist talk at Iris Bookcafe and Gallery in Over-the-Rhine, where his work is currently on view. Stu Levy: Landscape and Grid-Portraits runs through May 31 at Iris Cafe, where the walls are masterfully adorned with snapshots of Levy’s impressive body of work. The artwork is a photographic balance of grand landscapes and intimate grid portraits.

“I had always considered my landscape photos, especially the more abstract ones, to be the right brain activity compared to the rest of my life,” Levy said in an email to CityBeat. “But when the grid portraits started to emerge, they became a new right brain to the previous right brain. Both show the fine detail of the subject matter, but also suggest something beyond a more literal description of the person or place being photographed.”

During the artist talk, Levy says he plans to converse with the exhibit curator, Bill Messer, share the backstory of some exhibited photos – both landscape and grid portraits – and also reflect on his experience with photo education in Cincinnati and with Adams.

Messer has accomplished a museum-grade arrangement of Levy’s photographs at the OTR cafe, where visitors can also indulge in locally-sourced, house-made menu items and plenty of books.

Levy’s work appears in more than 24 institutional collections like the Cincinnati Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Museum of Photographic Arts and the Wilson Centre for Photography in London. Among international gallery placement, Levy’s work has also been published as two monographs and two single-image artist’s books, according to a press release.

“People have been after me to do a show with Stu for years, because there are a lot of people here who still know him. Both people in the music business, people who know him from his family and people who went to Walnut Hills with him,” Messer says. “He’s been great to work with.”

Messer says that when Levy left Cincinnati for life out west, the landscapes “blew his mind,” and years ago when Levy was attempting to capture a giant cave, he couldn’t get it all in one shot. Levy decided to take multiple images of the scene and piece them together, which became the inaugural work of Levy’s body of grid portraits. Levy’s black and white landscapes offer a glimpse into western terrain of all kinds, sometimes contrasted enough to feel abstract and other times encompasses sharp, majestic parts of nature.

His grid portraits tell intimate stories of their subjects, especially when featuring a person. The subjects often appear more than once in the images, displaying different activities or aspects of life. The expert collage of different scenes accomplishes sometimes chaotic movement that imparts an aerial view of an individual’s life. Whether it be an artist or politician, Levy includes components of his subject’s lives that create a cohesive image and detailed story.

“I think of the grid portraits as mini movies of the subject’s life,” Levy says. “But the viewer remembers a ‘frame’ from two or three different scenes and combines them into one space, even though they might have happened at different times and in different places. I think of it as recombinant architecture. I also emphasize the importance of all the artifacts in the subject’s environment which also help describe their personality.”

The artful way that Levy assembles his images could not be accomplished in one shot, without the numerous points of view and passage of time, the profound depiction of his subjects would be lost. In Levy’s portrait of Cincinnati resident and curator Mary Baskett, she is pictured three times within the piece. Once at her piano, another time sitting in a stairwell reading a book and once more happily posing on a balcony. Even though she is clearly photographed in various parts of her home, the work as a whole appears as one scene. In a trick of the eye, the viewer might think it’s digitally altered before taking a closer look.

“The portraits have this element of time, which he finds really interesting,” Messer says. “It's also got this opportunity to have multiple identifications, multiple personalities in the same image. Almost every other portrait is one thing, whatever it is, and it could be an amazing portrait. It could be a portrait that suggests many identities and things, but it’s still going to be one thing. So here, especially if you collaborate with your sitter, you get a chance to say, ‘Well, what do you want to express in this picture? What aspects of you do you want to be in this picture?’ And that's pretty great.”

Visit Iris Bookcafe and Gallery at 1331 Main St. in Over-the-Rhine. Stu Levy: Landscape and Grid-Portraits runs through May 31. Levy will be at the gallery on April 28 at 5 p.m. for an artist talk. Visit stulevyphoto.com for more information.