Bodies of Work

In photography class at South Mecklenburg High School, Bryce Lankard’s teacher told him and his fellow students to challenge traditional notions.

Inspiring advice received in one’s formative years so often goes the way of teenage crushes and ambitious goals, tucked into long-term memory. But for Lankard, that piece of wisdom became a lingering reality.

Surveying his latest exhibition of fine-art photographs at DOMA Gallery in Charlotte’s South End, Lankard talks about the ways he’s breaching boundaries. This particular show, “Bodies: Steel and Skin,” pairs his abstract nudes with a California  photographer’s shots of classic car details.

That his subjects are nudes hardly defies artistic sensibilities; the human body has always been a favorite theme of artists. Lankard’s approach to shooting and developing, though, places the female form in an unconventional light.

Photographing models with vintage Speed Graphic cameras using Polaroid positive-negative film, and manipulating the images on location, Lankard brings an artist’s touch to every stage of the process. He frames their bodies in layers of visual texture by solarizing the negatives – or prematurely exposing them to light during developing – scratching them and, back home, leaving air bubbles in the wet-scanning process. To add contrast with the film’s creamy texture and the models’ smooth curves, he shot them in sometimes harsh environments, such as deserts and caves.

Man Ray, the American-born artist who pushed lots of boundaries himself, photographed some of his nudes using solarization, but Lankard’s work adds different dimensions. His careful experiments produce an arresting tableau of sepia-like tone, timeless place and dreamy mood, as though the viewer were peering into the past, present and future all at once, a female figure the one constant.

Shadows are brought into light, lines unnaturally defined and parts of the women’s faces and bodies looking like negative images. In another twist of convention, Lankard often caught his subjects in dynamic tension rather than reclining, giving the shots a sense of motion.

Each model exudes her own personality and sense of confidence in her body. Excepting one woman with small breasts, the subjects fit traditional American ideals of female beauty, but Lankard says he most wanted to explore and celebrate the variety of that form.

“Women’s bodies are like snowflakes. No two are alike,” he says as he surveys his photographs from a red leather couch in DOMA, a scarf tied around his neck. “It’s an endlessly interesting subject to me. I find that I’m drawn to subject matter that is foreign to me or different from me. I have shot some male nudes, but I’m familiar with the male body.”

The confidence of his subjects led Lankard to do the project in the first place. As he worked in the early 1990s in New Orleans shooting portraits and fashion, female friends started asking whether he’d consider shooting them in the nude. The idea dovetailed with his interest in human subjects, so he agreed, at first trying a more traditional approach he had employed in his portraiture. This produced striking shots, but he says the results lacked distinction. Then he realized the vintage camera techniques he had used with other subjects would work perfectly for nudes because of the film’s malleable qualities.

He had bought several of the vintage cameras at yard sales and online auctions after playing with a friend’s camera because the idea of greater creative control appealed to him. He prefers big negatives, having abandoned 35 mm film around the time he started shooting nudes.

Lankard says his nude models, far from posing passively, collaborated with him on the shoots, often suggesting an expression they wanted to communicate. One of the women who posed for some of his earliest nudes recently approached him about shooting her again. She had ballooned to 200 pounds and wanted him to capture her in her new overweight state. He says he likes the idea, again, because for him the photographs are about form, line, texture and the variety and beauty of the female body, regardless of  size or age.

Due to Lankard’s methods, dating the photographs can be difficult, at least for an amateur viewer, and he wants it that way. For this reason he tries to avoid shooting tattoos or body piercings. For him, the organic methods he uses to produce the series represent a response to computerized photographic manipulation. He prefers to trust the unpredictability of the process, and in that sense fits a more traditional mold.

He has shot the women over the years in locations across the country. Though he still photographs nudes, he has slowed down because he says the makers of the film he uses in the Speed Graphic cameras stopped producing it several years ago. He has a case of the film that he’s saving for his nudes series, which he calls “The Illuminated Shadow.”

Tall and amiable, Lankard, 46, grew up in Charlotte and spent most of his early career working in New Orleans and New York, returning to his hometown a year ago to take a break from the post-Hurricane Katrina stressors of New Orleans. He specializes in fine-art and documentary photography in film and digital, including social landscapes, and though he still takes commercial jobs, he hopes demand for his art pieces eventually will grow enough to allow him to work on those exclusively.

While living in New Orleans, Lankard freelanced and co-founded a magazine, where he served as creative director. He moved to New York City in 1997, serving as art director for a publisher, then returned to New Orleans in 2006. There he co-founded the nonprofit New Orleans Photo Alliance to promote photographic art in the Gulf South.

His pictures have shown in New Orleans alongside works by American photographer Andres Serrano, and in a 2007 show in Paris about New Orleans that included shots by one of his heroes, Henri Cartier-Bresson. The DOMA show marks his first North Carolina exhibition, but a group exhibit of documentary photographs that opened in January at The Light Factory quickly followed.

Lankard expected his stay in Charlotte to be temporary, but he says the city has embraced him much more than he anticipated, so he is considering making his hometown his new base.

The human form is also muse for Charlotte painter Katherine Blackwell, a 25-year-old Vermont native who moved here in high school.

Like Lankard, she finds bodies beautiful and fascinating because of the endless variations on the form, and she, too, depicts it in unexpected ways. The complexity and the challenge of rendering an accurate likeness keep her working on as many as four paintings at once as she funnels her energy into a surrealist series called “The Melty People.”

Blackwell says she conceived the concept by accident as she doodled in class to focus her mind. Her father, also an artist, had always encouraged her to explore her creativity. As early as 9, she sketched spider web-like designs and clothed human bodies on the edges of notebook pages, frequently arousing the suspicions of her teachers, who sometimes confiscated the notebooks to redirect her attention, they thought, to them. On a whim one day in her early teens, she erased a line from a web, then erased a leg of a body she’d drawn beside it.

“And it was like a whole new world popped open,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Oh! I can play with them! It doesn’t have to look just like them!’”

Blackwell began manipulating the human form in her drawings, stretching it into ethereal strands that arranged themselves in symbolic patterns and designs or that connected the figures to other people. At the time, she was practicing her skill, but she realized later that the figures she creates have meaning. For her, they represent the emotional connections among people.

“We all have emotions, but we’re all connected,” says Blackwell, a softly smiling, bespectacled woman who looks less like the artist than the ravenous book reader she becomes in her down time. “You might cause somebody pain, but very rarely do you do it on your own.”

As Lankard’s nudes seem to move, so do the bald, naked women who people Blackwell’s creative universe. She paints only the color of flesh against glossy, black canvas, leaving the women bald for anonymity because she wants the viewer to fix on the feelings they symbolize and inspire.

One piece, titled “Navigating Your Way Into the Unknown,” shows a figure that appears to swim through a thicket of the fleshy strands emanating from her own body.

In another, “Pressures of the Non-blinking Third Eye,” a woman screams, her scalp contorted into a web of strands forming a tiny woman emerging from her host’s forehead. Blackwell says she painted this one after an unusual month of suspended painting activity. “I had to get the ideas out of my head and onto something.”