David Lebe

David Lebe (born 1948) is an American photographer. He is best known for his experimental images using techniques such as pinhole cameras, hand-painted photographs, photograms, and light drawings. Many of his photographs explore issues of gay identity, homoeroticism, and living with AIDS, linking his work to that of contemporaries such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Though his style and approach set him apart from these contemporaries, "Lebe is now incontrovertibly part of the history of twentieth-century queer artists."
Lebe was born in Manhattan and grew up downtown in Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village. He attended the progressive City and Country School and the High School of Music & Art, from which he graduated in 1966. By age fifteen he had developed a deep interest in photography and regularly visited New York's museums and galleries, where he admired the work of photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank, among others, and developed a life-long interest in street photography.
In the fall of 1966, Lebe enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA), where he studied photography with Ray K. Metzker, Barbara Blondeau, and Tom Porett. All three were graduates of Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology, founded by László Moholy-Nagy as a successor to Germany's Bauhaus, with a strong tradition of experimentation. It was in Blondeau's class in 1969–70 that he began to experiment with pinhole cameras, building his own devices with multiple apertures that allowed him to record panoramic views of the same subject from various angles. His senior thesis, Form without Substance, consisted largely of high-contrast images with strong black shadows taken in Philadelphia and around his childhood home in Manhattan. These early experiments have informed his approach to photography in subsequent decades, even as his methods and subject matter have changed.
After completing his studies in 1970, Lebe returned to PCA as an instructor in 1972. He would continue teaching at PCA (which became University of the Arts in 1985) until 1990. “An experimentalist less interested in capturing the real than in freeing his images from the constraints of reality,” he has produced multiple bodies of work that explore an array of subjects, often utilizing fundamental, relatively low-tech photographic techniques in innovative ways. Curator Tom Beck notes that “autobiography is the key to [Lebe’s] work, which has shifted from time to time among photograms, light drawings, and male nudes.”
Lebe's experimentation with pinhole pictures, begun as a student at PCA, continued through 1975. His first cameras had seven or nine apertures and could record 180-degree views but required access to a darkroom to change rolls of film between each photo. Around 1972 he added a more portable four-aperture camera that allowed him to photograph anywhere. Working both in the studio and outdoors, he collaborated with friends and strangers alike. "By opening and closing the apertures at different times, Lebe could create a single, scroll-like print of the whole event, transmuting it into a dreamy collage of social interactions." These images challenge the notion of the photograph as "decisive moment," or record of a single fixed view in a discrete moment in time. "The vision of the world Lebe’s pinhole photographs offer ultimately doesn’t feel so decisive at all," wrote poet and critic Jameson Fitzpatrick. "It is instead a refusal of settling on a definitive version of any given scene. There is no reality, these images suggest, only parallel realities."
Although Lebe sometimes shot with color film, he was dissatisfied with the results of color printing and the loss of darkroom control over the images. After finding a hand-coloring set in a camera store in New York, he began hand painting gelatin-silver prints, including pinhole images and photograms, and traditional photographs. In 1974–75 he created a series of images he called Unphotographs, meticulously hand-painted black-and-white photographic portraits of himself and others, often choosing colors that bore no relation to the actual subjects.
In 1976, Lebe purchased a townhouse in Philadelphia with space for living quarters, a darkroom, and a studio. He began making photograms using plants collected from his rooftop garden or from trips to the country or beach. He converted these negative prints into positives, occasionally adding a Sabattier effect during the printing process. Some prints he left black and white; for others, he hand-colored the negative and/or the positive, a unique process that "transformed the photograms into surreal painterly abstractions." Several distinct series emerged from this experimentation: Specimens, which features plants, bones, and other objects combined to create fantastic hybrid forms; Garden Series, images focused exclusively on plant material, often dissected and reassembled to create new “species”; and Landscapes, which places these hybrid forms in hand-painted (and often otherworldly) settings. Of these images, Lebe has said: “I was creating the gardens and landscapes I longed for. Along the way, other ideas got expressed.”
Lebe's first light drawings were self-portraits made in his small apartment in 1976. Using a 35mm camera on a tripod, he outlined his naked body with the flashlight, adding other lines and squiggles along the way. This initial experiment led to others in which he outlined people and objects, both indoors and outside in the nighttime cityscape. "Braiding the art of photography with the art of drawing, the artist caressed his models with light, sketching their faces, limbs, and genitals, and at times adding small fictional details such as luminous arcs touching the model’s bodies," wrote Lev Feigin in Hyperallergic. "Demarcating the boundaries of desire, light preserves the men’s traces while eliciting a feeling of touch."
Like the earlier pinhole photographs, the light drawings required long exposure times, allowed Lebe to come out from the behind the camera and interact with his subjects. In this sense, his images became records of events rather than of frozen moments in time. “Instead of being a ‘decisive moment,’ the photograph became the decisive twenty minutes,” he recalled in a 1993 interview. “It became the basis for the way I continue to work.”
Lebe continued to make light drawings for about a decade, becoming more and more adept at controlling and manipulating the light sources, which could include flashlights, strobes, and ambient light. In 1987, following the death of a close friend from AIDS and just before his own HIV diagnosis, he began creating abstract, figureless photos drawn freehand with a flashlight. Calling them Scribbles, Lebe made a number of these images, which often feature light emerging from a glass vase in the middle of a darkened space. At first, he felt that the photos “were frivolous and silly, and that I really had a responsibility to be making work that dealt with AIDS.” As he shared them with other people, however, he started to see them as representing the spirits of the dead and came to realize that they were indeed a response to the disease that was ravaging the gay community. “The pictures were really a defiance of the fear and the pain, a kind of celebration of the spirits of so many who had died.”
In 1989, through a mutual friend, Lebe met the adult film star and author Scott O'Hara, who asked Lebe to take pictures of him. Lebe would photograph O’Hara four times between then and O’Hara's death in 1998, in nude and often erotic images that also document the effects of AIDS on O’Hara's body, as well as his determination to embrace sexual pleasure as a positive force in spite of the disease.
Curator Peter Barberie notes that “these images differ from Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous exploration of similar subjects . . . by their emphasis on O’Hara’s personal sexuality. Whereas Mapplethorpe’s photographs are often overtly staged or cropped to objectify body parts and isolated sexual actions, Lebe’s are about his subject’s full presence in the world.” For Lebe, the Scott photographs represent “a refusal to give up on life’s pleasures” and “a triumph of the spirit over AIDS.”
In 1989, Lebe met Jack Potter, a ceramic artist and horticulturist, and the two quickly began a relationship that has endured for three decades. Both men were HIV-positive when they met, and they were suspicious of the single-drug treatments then being prescribed to fight the disease. After taking a cooking class with chef Christina Pirello, who was then teaching Macrobiotics, they embraced a Macrobiotic diet for about five years and eventually settled on a whole-foods plant-based diet, which they continue to maintain. Seeking a healthier and more peaceful environment, the pair moved to rural Columbia County, New York in 1993.
In 1992, as the couple transitioned from city to country, Lebe had started making still-life photographs featuring the organic vegetables that had become their staple. For this series, which he titled Food for Thought, Lebe shot arrangements of daikon, lotus root, squash, beans, wild kombu, and other foods against black backgrounds, sometimes adding spirals of light around them. In a sense, this series brought together his earlier plant photograms and the light-drawing portraits, with the vegetables standing in for the eroticized male nudes of the latter.
Despite their efforts at a healthy diet and lifestyle, Lebe and Potter both began to decline in the mid-1990s. In 1994, in the series Morning Ritual, Lebe documented his lover's daily self-care regimen in small, intimate black-and-white portraits. "Despite their relatively banal content, the photographs are heavy with the weight of illness and the knowledge not only of one’s own mortality, but also of a beloved’s," wrote Jameson Fitzpatrick in Art in America. "The anxious impulse to document the everyday makes the series seem as much an advance mourning ritual as a morning one." In Jack’s Garden (1996–97) Lebe made detailed studies of the gardens Potter had cultivated around their residence, not knowing how much longer they might have to enjoy them.
In 1996, Lebe and Potter began combination-drug therapy, which was showing great success in extending the lives of HIV-positive individuals. With an extended future, Lebe began exploring new ways of making photographs. By 2004, he had fully embraced digital photography and continued to take pictures of the garden and natural environment around their house for the series On May Hill. He also began making new color prints of older photographs, including his early pinhole prints, which he was now able to enlarge. With the pinholes he fulfilled a fantasy of seeing them the way he had always dreamed of them looking. In 2013 he embarked on a series titled ShadowLife, in which he records shadows and reflections illuminated by the early morning light streaming through the windows of his house, continuing the exploration his life-long fascination with shadows.
Lebe was the subject of a comprehensive survey exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in February–May 2019, consisting of 145 photographs from 1969 to the present, drawn primarily from the museum's extensive collection of work by the artist.