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Matinee: 'William Lesch, Desert Photographer' Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

3 December 2022

Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?

So we're pleased to present the 477th in our series of Saturday matinees today: William Lesch, Desert Photographer.

This 5:05 film by Peter Fuhrman profiles desert photographer William Lesch.

We join Lesch has he hikes into the Sonoran Desert early in the morning to set up his Nikon D850 with a 50mm Nikkor mounted on it to shoot a decaying Saguaro cactus on the desert floor.

Like the Saguaro he photographs, Lesch put down roots in the desert, raising two sons with his wife in a mud house they built in Tucson from bricks they made in the back yard.

"I started a business, began showing my work, and have had much success," he writes on his Web site. "There have been grants, shows around the country and even overseas, prints in important collections, a book published, all of that can be found in my resume.

"What matters are not awards or accolades, but whether or not I have managed to find the homeland I was seeking when I was in my twenties and whether I have been able to express its beauty to others through my work."

Living in the desert, in short, was a conscious choice, not an accident of birth. In fact, he was raised in the Midwest where he never saw a mountain or a canyon. But while studying to be a doctor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, he took an elective in photography and got hooked.

"My photographic heroes were the Western landscape photographers: Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Eliot Porter's book about Glen Canyon on the Colorado River, The Place No One Knew, was a revelation."

So he put down roots in the desert. And quickly consulted the experts in roots: the plants of the Sonoran Desert.

"They're the ones who know this place," he points out in the film. To learn how to live in the desert, he says, you have to spend time with the plants. You have to listen to them. "Our job is not to talk. Our job is to listen."

The chemistry he learned as a young man studying to be a doctor and later as a photographer has provided Lesch with a unique method of printing. In addition to archival pigment prints on Hahnemuhle and Breathing Color Cotton Rag papers, he offers pigment prints on painted metal and pigment relief prints on painted metal. All done by Lesch himself.

"My philosophy on printing is very simple: I take the photographs, I make the prints."

We get a glimpse of those approaches in the video. The more elaborate options echo what Lesch sees in the desert. The colors, the decay take on a life of their own, separate from the object he photographed.

But echoing what he has heard listening to the plants.


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