An Assignment that Hits Close to Home

Many people know me as a photographer specializing in food, but I also have a series of fine art landscape photography that I have been shooting over the years. I  have gotten a lot of satisfaction shooting this work as it allows me to get outside and really work with light, color and form in the context of a landscape. It was a wonderful surprise when a valued client who normally hires me for my food work, asked me to shoot some of my landscape work for an interior design project. It wasn't just any project, ironically enough the redesign was for the radiology department of Mass General Hospital in Boston. This is the hospital that my mother, who passed away from Breast Cancer, spent a good 20 or so years of her life on and off, getting screened, diagnosed etc. I was very excited to think that my images could be used to help create a space in which would help soothe a patient, like my mother, who might be feeling stressed by being in a hospital setting and the thoughts of being ill. I applauded the center for wanting to create this spa like setting for their patients and to understand the power of artwork, and landscapes to inspire and hopefully heal.

Two weeks ago, I travelled back to Boston and spent a number of days shooting around the area. I was up and out shooting the Charles River at 7am, ferrying out to some of the many islands in the Boston Harbor, driving out to historical Concord to shoot Walden Pond and Great Meadows. I was hired to come and shoot Boston, but in a way as not to be too specific with the imagery. It has been a very interesting assignment to say the least. Very emotional, very challenging and completely inspiring! I have seen some of the schematics on how the imagery  will be used. Some will be large murals behind reception desks, some will be framed pieces near patient areas or even nurses stations. I can't wait to share when it is all complete.

I am so grateful to my client for recognizing my personal work and involving it in such an important project.

Feeling Rather Eggy Today

A quiet moment when the water bubbles gently cradle the egg. That transformative moment before opacity- delicate and disarming.

Wayfare Magazine includes my photos from Rome in their first printed edition to be sold at Anthropologie.

I am excited to see some of my photos from my trip to Rome in the first printed issue of Wayfare Magazine. When I mentioned to a friend and colleague Peggy Wong that I was taking a trip to Rome, she told me that she wanted to see my photos when I returned, and that she may want to include them in the first printed edition of Wayfare Magazine (a cool new travel mag that turns that category a bit on it's head.)

What was nice about this request was that it wasn't really an assignment. She wanted to see the photos that I would take for myself, she was especially interested in seeing what I shot for my personal series of work entitled "Bodies of Land" which is comprised of out of focus landscapes, or in this case cityscape's.

I also played a lot with Instagram for this trip since I liked the format, the accessibility to capture things at any time and the tones that were rendered with some of the filters. I am usually not a big "effects" photographer, nor do I like a lot of retouching. I liken the filters to using different types of film or printer paper.

Here is the text that accompanies the images in the magazine:

Photographer Leigh Beisch, along with her husband, father, and ten-year-old

daughter, forgo their annual trip to Cape Cod for something a little more mysterious. Here we get a light-filled glimpse into the beauty of a region teeming with old world intrigue.

We decided to rent a small apartment in Trastevere, located on the outskirts of Rome and just south of Vatican City. We booked the apartment for two weeks so we could spend one week as tourists and the next week as locals. While Rome is where scale and extraordinary monuments are on display at every turn, the color and texture of this neighborhood are what captured our hearts. Here we felt like we could experience art, not just see it. The building of our tiny rented apartment had the most amazing rustic front door that was designed to keep out invaders during the medieval period. There was also a stone staircase that was so worn with age that I could imagine a young slave girl carrying water up them thousands of years ago. Staying here instead of a hotel allowed us to let the language of the place—the people, the light, the smells—to seep in and shape our experience. The family and I enjoyed being part of the neighborhood’s everyday routines, sampling from the well-visited osterias and trattorias; shopping at the local designer clothing boutiques; and enjoying the famous Sunday flea market, Porta Portese. One place we frequented was local trattoria La Scala, where my daughter would order her favorite dish of spaghetti con burro e parmigiano, a simple dish of pasta with butter and parmigiano. One of my favorite dishes here was the tagliolini cacio e pepe con fioridi zucca e pachino, a pasta with a beautiful squash blossom layered on top, then sprinkled with parmesan and ground pepper.

SEE. I spent some time shooting for my personal work

entitled “Bodies of Land,” which is a series of abstract

landscapes that are out of focus with the subject matter

being light and color. This allows me to create a more

timeless landscape that captures the imagination.

EAT. My father and I woke up early a few mornings

to photograph. Before we headed out, we stopped

at the local Bar for morning cappuccinos and jam

filled pastries. I loved the colorful trays here

Our first morning in Rome, we headed to the Piazza di Santa Maria, where we found a beautiful fountain guarding the entrance to the Basilica of Our Lady, or Basilica di Santa Maria, one of the most ancient churches in Rome. So ancient, in fact, that it’s one of the few churches where you can see Christ depicted as a living prophet, rather than on the cross. It was here that I noticed the light streaming in through the clerestory, illuminating select statues and giving the sense of divine light. This light shaped my experience in Rome, becoming my subject matter and focal point of the trip. The photo of the portal looking out onto the wall with a row of dotted trees was at the entrance to Hadrian’s Villa, a Roman Emperor of the 2nd century AD. The wall pictured here was built to be just one mile long, which was the length of the palace and, according to our guide, the distance that the Emperor’s physician had advised him to walk every day. The morning light of this photo gives us a glimpse into what one of the Emperor’s walks might have been like. From the cobblestone streets and terracotta and maize buildings cast in deep wine hues to street windows dotted with laundry lines, Rome was richer than I had ever imagined. I loved the color of the place, and the way the light would fill ancient crevices to reveal some things and hide others. It felt as though this light held the secrets of Rome.

Orange Raincoat

I have orange raincoat. It's color makes it playful- but also because it was designed by Marc Jacobs. It brings some fun to these dark wet days of winter.

The Most Meaningful Photo of My Life was Shot with an iphone

The Most Meaningful photo of my life was shot with an iphone.

I have owned various cameras for over the years, starting in middle school with the Kodak Instamatic, then graduating to a Nikon F2 when entering the photography program at RISD and now an arsenal of various format cameras both film and digital to meet the needs of my professional assignments. For the past couple of years however, I have found myself intrigued with iphonography (to give it an official sounding name) ever since I captured one of the most meaningful shots of my life with my phone! 

Back in 2009, a few months before my mother passed away, I captured a photo of her and my daughter walking back from Church. I wouldn’t have thought to carry my camera to church, and honestly at that stage of her illness she was not all that open to having her photo taken – due to the wig and all. I happened to be walking in front of them on that rainy Sunday in Mill Valley, CA and turned around and saw them together- walking and chatting. I grabbed my phone and snapped the photo without them even knowing I was taking the photo. That photo later became an important one to many members of her family and friends because it truly captured her spirit, her strength, her beauty and her incredible connection that she had with my daughter. I was able to capture that brief moment unnoticed because of the camera phone. It is a camera that is not perceived as one so people act differently around it, they seem more relaxed, more like their true selves- not their “camera ready"self.

Up until then I didn’t think too much of taking photos with my phone, now I use it for personal snapshots, personal projects and most recently for an editorial project. I find the “phone” to be an incredibly immediate connection to capturing the moment, the feeling, and the energy of the scene without all the technical maneuvering that sometimes needs to occur with more complex cameras. For me it is like painting, a direct, immediate and satisfying way of making art. And I love that it puts the power to make great photos in the hands of everyone!

The power of capturing the world so effortlessly has in turn captured our attention. It has shifted how we communicate. We connect through images shared. Images of the real world, of real, raw moments that are most times unedited and un art directed. And yes, there are a lot of not so great images out there, but the power to create is infectious and with time the images get better and sometimes develop huge followings. Now they reserve seats at the US Open not just for the top sports photographers but also for the top instagrammers- ones who have hundreds and thousands of followers! 

When they called this the information age they had no idea how right they were. We have become impassioned with communicating with each other,  in bursts of words on twitter/facebook/texts and now bursts of color, light and pixels in the form of instagram/iphonography.

Also check out my instagram on http://instagrid.me/leighbeisch/

if you do make sure to scroll down to see some of my photos of Rome from a recent trip.  More to come on that!

My photograph "Green Tomatoes" will be included in upcoming APA Something Personal Exhibit in San Francisco

Shadowplay

Walking back to my car after seeing the Picasso exhibit at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, I was inspired by how the painter makes us look at things. The cubist notion of muliple perspectives making up the complete experience of a place or event. Combining this with an exercise the photographer Bruce Davidson once told my father about of walking around the same block in New York everyday and finding new things to photograph. Shadows were interesting me that day as the San Francisco sun was out and the light was crisp in a way you find nowhere else but by the ocean in Northern California. I found myself really looking and discovering a new perspective of the experience of my walk on that beautifully sunny day in the park.

Photo collage: home

I love looking at the everyday. A shadow, a moment when the dog is making a cool composition sitting on the rug, the light on the diningroom table, the cooking utensils looking like a Jan Groover photograph. Fragments of our world. Keep your eyes open.