Portrait of Isa Leshko. Copyright James Goncalves. See more at www.jangophotographs.com.
Photographer Isa Leshko is a woman on the move. Recently hitting a career milestone of four exhibition openings within 30 hours, she shows no sign of slowing or complacency.
When I sat down with Isa in a downtown Salem coffee shop, I was taken by her professionalism and appealingly projected confidence and determination. She first impressed me with an impeccably printed and presented portfolio of prints to examine while she talked about her beginnings in photography.
After spending a considerable amount of time glaring at a computer screen during her years as a computer programmer, project manager and software engineer for dot-com startups through the 90’s (to name just a few of the hats she’s worn), Isa decided to take a photography class.
“The eighteen hour days were leaving me very little time to savour life,” said Isa. At the Decordova Museum where she took her first class, she says instructor Ri Anderson, “exposed us to folks like Mary Ellen Mark, Cyndi Sherman, Richard Avedon, and others.” Anderson taught not only the techniques of the trade, but also the history and the heart of the medium. Isa was hooked.
The portfolio Isa presented during our interview contained sets of images from her three major bodies of work, “Thrills and Chills”, “Elderly Animals,” and “Waterscapes”. While each series varies in subject matter, they congruently exhibit her sensitivity to what lies beneath the surface of everyday awareness.
Girls on Buccaneer, Hershey Park, PA. Copyright Isa Leshko.
In her first body of work, Isa focuses on carnival rides, which she herself fears. While she suspects that the draw to this project stems from her childhood in New Jersey, she says, “This work is not about nostalgia… it’s all about fantasy. I am fascinated by what it is that draws people to surrender themselves to these machines.”
Girls on Buccaneer, Hershey Park, PA, portrays the most literal translation of the range of emotions Isa seeks to capture in this body of work. The image is composed much like one’s physical experience of a carnival ride. We, as a viewers, are first grounded by the artists decision to touch the bottom of the carriage to the bottom plane of the image, and then elevated, experiencing the ride through the full range of the subjects’ facial expressions of elation, joy and paralyzing fear.
In a second print, Point Pleasant, NJ #1, the image was shot from a child’s perspective. Isa layed on the ground and took a picture of a night time scene of riders whipping around a lit up carnival swing ride. The slow shutter speed allows the fleeting screams and fear of the riders to materialize and become foreboding, darkened visions speeding around the center column piece; inexplicably drawn to the bright lights like moths.
Point Pleasant, NJ #1. Copyright Isa Leshko.
A self-described perfectionist, Isa often uses toy cameras such as her Holga and Diana models. She compares the toy cameras to punk music in their ability to convey a certain emotion of immediacy, but says they are both, “deceptive in their apparent simplicity, because they are not simple.”
She chooses these cameras specifically for their imperfect image producing qualities. Isa says. “I am an incorrigible perfectionist who finds it liberating to create images that are beautifully imperfect.” She relishes the element of surprise when developing her film, but immediately brings the control back into the process through her flawless techniques which include traditional wet darkroom printing as well as using some digital printing processes.
For her color series, the films are traditionally developed, then scanned and relayed digitally to a traditional light enlarger, and developed in a wet room. The resulting image shows no sign of digital snow and maintains a photo quality that appeals to purists. “Most of my work is done completely in the wet darkroom with no digital interaction. I really pride myself on this point, particularly because Holga negatives can be so tricky to print,” explained Isa.
In “Aging Animals” Isa uses a traditional camera set up, putting down her toy camera to bring awareness to an ignored aging population that exists amongst us. We don’t often see animals in their later stages of life in popular imagery. We like to see animals with shiny smooth feathers, coats which show no signs of stress or greying, and a lively gleam in their eyes; inviting us to want to pet, touch, and care for them.
This series of work portrays animals in their later years. Tired and noble, eyes more knowledgeable than innocent, coats worn and showing signs of life experience, the animals in this series make us face our own process of aging as well as how we see the elders in our society, both animal and human.
Moonie, Age 32. Copyright Isa Leshko.
This series began six months after Isa spent most of 2007 in New Jersey caring for her mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s. Isa wasn’t deliberately looking to start a series based on her experience as her mother’s caretaker, in fact, she purposefully put down her camera during this time. “I wanted to be fully present as a daughter, not a photographer, ” said Isa. She was introduced to an elderly blind horse who was staying on a relative’s property. The full emotions of her experience with her mother were still present and Isa was compelled to photograph the animal.
In “Aging Animals”, Isa treats her subjects with the same sensitivity and sincerity photographer Nicholas Nixon shows in photographing his human subjects. Isa remarks that while there are photographers, like Nixon, who can photograph the elderly and dying in a sincere way, “Animals are not image conscious.”
Waterscape II. Copyright Isa Leshko.
The third and only color series, “Waterscapes,” struck me as a perfect visible metaphor for Isa’s ability to capture not only what lies on the surface, but also what lies beneath.
In her waterscapes, Isa captures the true color of the sand below the water without forsaking the muddied, pale, green-brown for a more tempting blue-sky reflective hue, as photographers often do. She also holds true the color of the water underneath the surface, and composes around the physical qualities of the surface layer and its relationship with the water and ground below, giving foreground, middle ground and background by peering through the image, as if it were three dimensional rather than presented in a plane.
She also focuses on the effects of the water. Whether highlighting subtle lines in the sand below, or rocks pushed toward the shore at the edge of a crashed, foaming wave, the focus is on the subtle effects of the ocean on its shore as much as it is on the ocean.
Isa considers herself a “serious craftsperson” and its apparent in her work. While she has met with rejection, she says, “Rejection is part of an artist’s life. You have to make peace with that. Perseverance is an important part of success.”
Another tool for success as an artist, she believes, is the Artist’s Professional Tool Box, a career planning program for artists facilitated by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston.
This program offered her many networking opportunities and enabled her to master the business side of the arts, something many artists struggle with so early in their careers.
Isa Leshko has built her career here on the North Shore, having lived the past eleven years in Salem. Faced with opportunities for both herself and her partner elsewhere, the two have recently decided to move to Houston Texas, a city rich with opportunities for photographers. ”The MFA Houston has one of the largest and most in depth photography collections in the US and the curator of photography there is widely respected,” says Isa.
In December Isa will have her work reviewed at the Photo NOLA festival in New Orleans, and she has already joined a very active professional photography society in Houston.
It has been a pleasure seeing Isa’s career bloom here on the North Shore. She has assured us here at ArtThrob that she has plenty of business here in Massachusetts and will be traveling here regularly for exhibits, including an exhibition of her “Thrills and Chills” series at the Griffin Museum of Photography from April 8th-May 9th, 2010 with an opening reception on April 15th and a gallery talk on April 11th. She worked closely with a master printer, Paul Sneyd of
Panopticon Imaging to print these final exhibition prints.
She also ships internationally, and follows a strict code of personal customer service, making it easy for collectors to acquire her works regardless of her location.
“Professionally this may be a very good move for me. But, I love Salem; love my neighborhood (I live on Federal St.) and will miss the arts community here dearly. I moved to New England after graduating college in 1993, so this area has been my home for my entire adult life. This is a BIG move for me and is bittersweet,” she writes in an email, notifying me of this recent decision.
Isa Leshko is a woman on the move, and I for one, can’t wait to see what she discovers during her next phase of life, lying beneath the surface.
For more about Isa Leshko: http://www.isaleshko.com/
The Artist Professional Toolbox: http://www.artsandbusinesscouncil.org/programs/artistrsquos-professional-toolbox.php
Griffin Museum of Photography: http://www.griffinmuseum.org
