Bill Lesch
Bill Lesch studied every photograph in the Center for Creative Photography’s collection as a student and received a comprehensive education in the field. Not incidentally, he also became CCP’s first staff photographer.
Decades later in 2008, after a long and successful career, an accident left him close to death, basically helpless and facing a long recovery. Partly as a result of that experience, he is preoccupied with questions of time and paying attention. Zocalo’s current cover photograph is part of a series, thirty years in the making and still in progress, consisting of time exposures of clouds and water.
“I work on the series sort of like how rain falls in the desert — I may spend several months of a year working on them a lot, then work on a different series of ten years, then go back to the first one,” Lesch said.
Time passing is and always has been his subject matter. A sense of urgency drives him. Nearly dying inspires that frame of mind. “I can’t work fast enough.”
A resident of downtown’s Barrio Viejo, Lesch states that “there’s nowhere else I would rather live.”
Adobe work and basic construction on his home, including stone masonry, engaged him between school and an ultimate return to photography. Since his passion is “making something with my hands,” he also now creates oversized mesquite sculptures.
In the fall, the gallery at Tohono Chul will include Lesch’s photographs in “Night in the Southwest.”
View his visual poetry at WilliamLesch.com.
"Stormclouds Developing Over Downtown Tucson" by Bill Lesch, a twenty minute time exposure taken August 8, 2006, and from the series “Clouds Over Time.” Currently showing at Etherton Gallery.
