Shooting Movement

Photographer: Bill Lesch
Years Downtown: 30
Specialty: fine art
Favorite Subject: Sonoran Desert

Photographers train their lenses on the universe, as both macrocosm and microcosm. This art that is also a technique has an expert practitioner in William (Bill) Lesch. He attended the University of Arizona in the 1970s, where not only was he hired as the first staff photographer for the Center for Creative Photography, but also had his initial show there in 1979.

In Barrio Viejo (“there’s nowhere else in Tucson I would rather live”), he and his wife reside in an ancient adobe that has been transformed by his own hands (since he purchased it in 1982) into a livable work of sculpture. Bill added a room here, then another, then a couple that serve as studio space or guest rooms. In the middle is a distinctly south-of-the-border style courtyard crammed with the raw materials for creativity.

Bill’s images don’t depict frozen, static moments, but the actual passage of time caught in the act; movement is implicit, as is a sense of flow and impetus. The dramatic shots of oncoming storms and captured wind that line the south wall of Janos Wilder’s Downtown Kitchen Cocktails are emblematic of this genre – breathtaking in the truest sense of the word.

The problem of translating his visions into photographs causes Bill to express envy of the painters he knows and admires, and he confesses that he is jealous of the way they can change the scale of things – small versus large – so he’s been experimenting with something like photographic collage techniques, selecting shapes rather than wholes to be pieced together using the computer.  Asked about his artistic preferences, this quiet and unpretentious man says, “What I like is to find stuff that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”  He cites the work of Jim Wade and Fred Sommer as exemplary for this purpose.

With more than one hundred group and one-man shows here and everywhere, Bill’s twenty-year commitment and dedication to his art have manifested into visual icons of the desert, saguaros, mountains, water and cityscapes with the rich textures and intricate layered effects he produces. Recently, he’s been experimenting with a version of double exposure, darkroom created rather than in the camera, resulting in unexpected combinations, limited only by printing methods.

In addition to ongoing photographic projects, Bill sculpts mesquite trunks and eucalyptus logs, crafting sensuous and sinuous shapes reminiscent of what the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon carves in stone, organically rhythmic and graceful, the grain of the wood emphasized by curves and lines. He’s hoping for a combined photograph and sculpture exhibit sometime in the near future.

See his work online at WilliamLesch.com.