Fritz Photography

Travis and Nicole have been a lot of fun to work with as they’ve planned their wedding celebration at The Resort at the Mountain.  (You can see their engagement portraits, flying football and all.)

The Resort at the Mountain, in Welches, Oregon, on Mt Hood, is a beautiful place.  Its 27-hole golf course wends its way through fir trees and around lakes; they have a new spa; tons of beautiful condos and rooms; banquet halls; and much, much more.

Instead of just a single day of wedding festivities, Travis and Nicole took advantage of the Resort’s facilities and spent several days with their families and friends, playing games, eating well, golfing, and having a great time.  The wedding itself was the culmination of this long weekend of fun.

And what a wedding it was.  With a large wedding party, and a long guest list, it was an event not to be missed.  From the ceremony on the Pine Bluff, to our portraits along the river, to the dinner and dance party in the ballroom, it was a full day.  So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show:

Kelsey lives in Woodland and goes to Woodland High School.  She was telling me that she didn’t want the same standard senior portrait photographs that all her friends have, so she called me.  She wanted someone who approached high school senior portraits more as an artist.  I think I did her proud by creating some striking but unique portraits of this beautiful, confident young lady.

She wanted an urban setting, so we headed down to the area around the Burnside Skate Park, for texture.

Thanks as usual to our in-house hair and makeup artist, AJ’s Hair Design and Makeup, for accentuating the beautiful colors of this unique young lady!

See more of our unique senior portrait photography in the Portland-Vancouver area on our website, www.fritzphoto.com!

This month, RayKo Photo Center, in San Francisco, will be featuring images from my Skeleton in the Closet series in their show Por(trait) Revealed. I’ll be there for the opening on July 28, so if you are in the Bay Area, please join me!

(Por)trait Revealed //  A juried exhibition of portrait photography

Reception: Wednesday, July 28th, 6-8p

7.28.10 – 9.10.10

Featured artists:  Mark Menjivar & Fritz Liedtke
RayKo Photo Center presents the final selections from an open call for photographic work exploring the genre of portraiture and varying characteristics of us humans.

Fritz Liedtke’s Skeleton in the Closet is a series of intimate portraits and stories of those who struggle with eating disorders. In a society saturated with shallow, narrow definitions of beauty, anorexia and bulimia are an increasingly prevalent trend. Movie stars, magazine ads, fad diets, internet pornography, fashion models, MTV…the pressure to look thin and attractive is an oppressive force that is difficult to resist. Everyone wants to be an American Idol. But obsession with appearance is not the only motivation for restrictive eating. Dancers, gymnasts, wrestlers, models, and others, find themselves in unhealthy eating patterns in order to stay competitive. Ultimately, the disorder is really a means for controlling one part of a person’s world–a world which may, in the end, be destroyed by the disorder itself.

How does an artist find time to make art, on top of juggling all of his other responsibilities? Why do so many art school graduates fail to go on to successful artmaking careers? How do you make a living and make art?

These are questions I explore in my current article Buying Time: Balancing the Fine Art and the Financial, published in LensWork Magazine (issue 89). It’s a frank discussion of decisions an artist must make if she wants to make a life making art. I quote Rolf Potts and Annie Dillard, talk about money, and discuss drawing lines in the sand. It’s advice gained from my own pursuit of the arts, and I encourage you to pick up a copy of this absolutely beautiful magazine (one of the finest reproductions on the market) and read it.

Rose loves to laugh!  In fact, it was hard not to take a photograph of her not smiling or laughing.

As a senior at St Mary’s Academy, Rose has been a varsity volleyball player, until a recent injury put her on the sidelines.  But that hasn’t kept her from a tour of Europe with her French class, or from doing volunteer work here in Portland.  And it obviously hasn’t kept her from her beautiful smile and easy laughter.  With such a great attitude and beautiful smile, we’re pleased to have Rose as our Senior Portrait Representative at St Mary’s this year!

We spent some time in Portland’s Pearl District, creating some portraits that showcased her sunny disposition, and here are some favorites!

With hair and makeup by AJ’s Hair Design and Makeup, Rose looked great for our shoot!  You can view the slideshow of her downtown Portland senior portrait photography here:

Boys bathing and playing in a rain-swollen stream in the mountains of Haiti.

Haiti.

I got the call just two and a half weeks before we left. Seth Johnson rang me up and told me he couldn’t get me off his mind. He was going to Haiti with a friend, and thought I might want to join them. I told him I’d think about it.

Haiti is not someplace I have ever wanted to go. In fact, it’s somewhere that I actively did not want to go. It’s always sounded miserable, in short: hot, poor, backward, spiritually dark, miserable. Add to that a devastating earthquake, and you have the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere in shambles.

Nonetheless, as I considered it, I knew I had to go. Shannon agreed with me, and so I bought my tickets, and started packing and preparing. There is little information available on how to prepare to travel and photograph in Haiti. Even the Multnomah County Library System, one of the finest in the nation, had no travel guides for Haiti. Zero. And even if they did, I thought, how would I prepare for a country devastated by an earthquake? Thankfully, one of my photographer friends, Aisha, had just returned from photographing there (view her midwife/maternity photos here), and we talked at some length about her experience.

To make preparation a little more difficult, I wasn’t even sure what my assignment was in Haiti. I just knew that I was supposed to go, and trusted I would find out why as I went. So I packed my bags, my camera gear, my Malaria pills and electrolyte packets and Power Bars, and I went.

I met up with Seth Johnson (my travel and documentary partner from Transitions Global, with whom I created a documentary on child sex slavery in Cambodia in 2008) and Cory Grimm (of Mission Haiti) in Miami. We then met up with a youth group that flew in from Bellingham, Washington, headed to a hotel for a short night’s sleep, and then boarded a morning flight for Port-au-Prince.

While on the airplane, I sat next to an American gentleman who was working in Haiti, with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization started by Franklin Graham. He told me of the work he was overseeing, building hundreds of small temporary homes for locals, places for Haitians to live while their concrete homes in the city were being rebuilt. As I looked around the plane, I could see numerous people in similar lines of work, talking and preparing for their time on the ground in Haiti. It was truly a beautiful sight, to see a 737 full of people headed over to help.

Landing in Port-au-Prince, we discovered that portions of the airport had been damaged in the quake; as a result the immigration/customs/baggage claim was held in a repurposed warehouse. Occasionally cooled by rattling fans, it took us a couple of hours to make our way through the checkpoints and find all our luggage. Then we were herded through the crowds and on to our school bus for the five hour drive ahead.

Port-au-Prince was not leveled completely by the earthquake. In fact, much of the city looked fine. This was deceptive, the American gentleman on the airplane had explained. Many buildings were left standing, but were so damaged that they can not be used. While much of the city looks fine, it is uninhabitable. As a result, our drive through the clogged streets was marked by the common site of blue and white tarp/tent encampments, piles of rubble, buildings with visible cracks and broken windows, and scores of Haitians getting on with their lives.

We were not headed to the city, but to a village on the southern coast, outside of Les Cayes, named Ti Riviere. We drove through tropical rainstorms, fording rivers where bridges were damaged (prior to the earthquake), passing through bustling towns, past crumbled buildings, small markets, rice farms, down to the ocean, and into the jungle.

Petite Rivier is a village (more, in my opinion, a rural area, rather than a concentrated village) of a few thousand people, stretching from the dirty ocean shoreline up into the steep green mountains. Our home for the week was here, situated at the crossroads between the road and the path that leads up into the hills. Here we found the orphanage compound of Mission Haiti.

Over the course of my time there, I was very impressed with Mission Haiti. The founder, Pam, was there while we were, and that lady knows how to get things done. Probably the same age as me, she and her husband and kids have been working in Haiti for 15 years. Their work now includes the orphanage, 3 schools up in the hills that they’ve built and run, and approximately 1500 children who are sponsored by foreigners so they can have a square meal each day, and an education. I was stunned to discover that it costs only $50 a year to send a child to school and feed them a decent meal each day.

Some of these children are now at the age where they are finishing up their schooling. That’s where Cory Grimm comes in. His passion is to help these students pursue their dreams and passions. And this, it seemed, was also where I came in. I had the privilege of helping Cory research and build bridges with local schools and universities for these students, and also to spend time with these kids, talking with and encouraging them.

Over the course of my time in Ti Rivier, I enjoyed walking and talking with Emanuel, Patruko, Elisee, Junior, and others, in their burgeoning English, and my extremely limited French. Elisee loves to write, especially poetry, so we spent time reading his poetry and talking about teaching. Patruko creates stunning 3-dimensional sculpted paintings, and we were able to talk about art and craft and business. We also were able to make him (with the astute help of Pam’s dad) a miter box, so he can begin to cut his own frames. Patruko also is a leader among the local youth, and I developed a real respect for him and his gentle wisdom.

Cory is also a natural, gentle leader, and over the course of our time together, I developed a real respect for him and his humble service of the youth in Ti Rivier. He will be moving with his family to the orphanage in the fall, and his full-time presence will be a real blessing to the students there. I was honored to be able to serve with him in his preparations for full-time work in the area.

Each evening, the local youth, along with the American youth and adults, would gather for a couple of hours at the orphanage. There’d be singing and games, and a time for conversation and teaching. Cory and I ended up speaking with the youth over the course of the week on the topic of pursuing their dreams and passions, whether big or small; about having hope and a future. This in turn led to good conversations with the kids during the week, and seemed to be of real encouragement to them.

We also spent a couple of days hiking up in the mountains, visiting with various families there, checking in with them and their children. This felt at once odd (a few white guys checking in on families in a foreign culture and language?) and fascinating (I was there to support and photograph, after all, which I did a lot of). At the very least, the sometimes grueling hikes in the steep, green, eroding mountains, in both torrential rains and burning sunshine, were beautiful hikes, and great times of conversation with our local friends and interaction with the local culture.

This was the first time in my travels that I’ve been in the home of someone who lived on the top of a mountain ridge, a 2 hour walk along a little path to the nearest road. And this was not an isolated house, but a little village of homes, amongst a panoramic view of little houses dotting the mountainside, where people scrape together a living off the hardscrabble hillside. The families there were happy to see us (or at least, entertained by our appearing), and fed us fresh coconut and asked us to take their photos, which I was happy to do.

Seth’s work in Haiti, in addition to helping Cory, was to research the restavek situation as part of his work in the fight against human trafficking. In Haitian culture, it is not uncommon for a family to give away one of its children to another family of better means. This child then becomes, in effect, their indentured servant, performing the household chores of cooking and cleaning, in exchange for food and, perhaps, an education. The way in which these restavek children are treated varies from household to household, where they may be abused and treated like dirt, or be cared like family. It’s a complicated situation, and one in which it is difficult to make a blanket moral judgment. If left with their birth family, the child may starve; if given away, they may be severely abused. One of our hikes involved checking in on a child who, it is suspected, is restavek. Unfortunately, the child was not at the house when we called, or so we were told.

My time in both Nicaragua and Haiti have given me occasion to ponder poverty more deeply than I ever have in my life. While this is a topic larger than I will address here, I was nonetheless struck by a story Pam related to me. She described a young lady in her early 20s who is unable to perform even simple math, or remember how to spell, because as a child she was so malnourished that her brain was unable to properly develop. This is so common, Pam went on to say, that many adults are really children in their level of intelligence and maturity. This contributes to these adults not caring for and nurturing their own children, who are often left to fend for themselves, both physically and psychologically. And so the circle of poverty and ignorance continues.

It is easy for me to feel deadened by the enormity of the need in the world. I am learning to find solace in the fact that I do do what I can, that I am obedient to care for the poor as much as I am able, and that carrying the entire weight of the wretchedness of the world is not my job. My job is to do what I am given to do, to do it well and faithfully, and to enjoy doing it. That’s everybody’s job, really. If only everyone would do this, we’d all be in a much better spot as a world.

I’m encouraged by the work of people like Pam and her family. She saw the need in Haiti 15 years ago, and jumped in and did something about it. Fifteen years later, she can point to people like Elisee and his poetry and desire to teach, or Patrouko and his leadership among the youth of the community, or any number of other children who were raised in the orphanage or the local schools. She knows that these kids will give something back to their community, and will be a part of rebuilding Haiti, from the ground up.

I’m privileged to have the opportunity to work alongside people like Pam and Cory and Seth, Elisee and Patrouko. It humbles me on a regular basis to see such servant-hearted people working around the world, from that airplane that brought us into Port-au-Prince, to all over Haiti, to all over the world, making the world a better place. It’s my privilege to be among them, and to be able to tell their stories, through photographs and words, to the rest of the world. It’s my hope that you will join us.

If you’d like to see an extended set of images, please enjoy the following slideshow:

In 2007, I had the privilege of photographing a wedding out in the country, on an estate that included a lake and an outdoor model railroad, and a lot of children.  It was a beautiful day, and Gretchen and I had a great time photographing Brian and Sybil’s wedding.

Fast forward 3 years, and I get a call from Sybil, who lives in New York.  She and Brian now have two blue-eyed boys, and are coming to Oregon to see family, and wondered if we might shoot some family portraits.  Well, of course I would.

So we met up at a beautiful Portland park, on a blustery June day, which couldn’t decide if it was going to give us spring rain or summer sunshine.  And we took some family portraits.  Here are a few favorites.

Last year I began offering Model Portfolio Photography packages, as a way to help budding models build a quality portfolio which they can show to agencies, reps, and photographers.

This past week, we created a lovely set of images for Shakira Williams, a new model in Portland.  After an hour with our in-house hair and makeup artist, we set out and created a lovely set of images for her portfolio.

The longer I’m around this planet, the more opportunities I have to discover that it really is a small world.

I’ve photographed students at DaVinci Middle School, here in Portland, since about 2001.  I began there working on my fine arts thesis project, working with several teachers and tons of students, observing, photographing, and writing.  I loved working with the students so much, I couldn’t stop after I acquired my BFA.  I kept photographing there over the years, creating portraits with pretty much every format of film and digital camera I’ve owned.  I’ve had series of this work published in magazines and books, and shown in galleries.  I’ve taught in the classrooms there, presented my work on numerous occasions, encouraged students, worked with teachers.  It’s been a real delight.

Last week I was photographing at the school during my favorite week of the year: Spirit Week.  Among other students, one girl caught my attention as she worked in the hallway, preparing for a performance of Romeo and Juliet.  I asked if I could take her portrait, and we created some beautiful images.  Afterward, as I always do, I gave her a form to have her parents fill out and return to me, including my contact info and website.

Well, the next day I returned to the school to photograph some more, and this girl, Zoe, came up to me.

“Do you photograph weddings?” she asked me.

“Yes, I do.  Why do you ask?” I replied.

She just stared at me for a moment, and then said, “I think you photographed my dad’s wedding.”  We chatted a little more, and lo and behold, she was right: I shot her dad’s wedding in 2003, at the beach.  And then it dawned on me: this girl had looked familiar, and it’s because I had photographed her at the wedding 7 years ago.  I could even picture an image we’d taken of her, spinning around in her flower girl dress.

And here she is today:

I had a similar small world DaVinci story last night.  At the opening of my show at Froelick Gallery, I recognized a DaVinci student, Perry, whom I’d photographed the same day as Zoe.  I said hi, and then noticed another girl with her that looked familiar.  It turned out to be Meg, a DaVinci student who was in my Adolescence series (the Hallway Fairy in my Welcome to Wonderland series), now a graduating senior at Cleveland High.

I talked with the girls and their mom, and discovered that Meg is going to attend the Academy of Art University in San Francisco to study photography.  I’d been impressed with her photography back when she was in the 8th grade.  In fact, I even traded her for a beautiful little portrait she’d taken of her sister.

And then it dawned on me: this portrait, which I have up in my office, of her sister, was Perry, who I’d just photographed last week at DaVinci for a current series I’m working on.  I’d had no idea they were related until they walked into the gallery.

Small world.

Curator Leo Michelson and gallery owner Charles Froelick called me up last year with an intriguing idea. They were pairing up 17 painters with 17 photographers, asking them to create a portrait of one another. The resulting show is titled Two of a Kind.

I was paired with local painter Shanon Playford, whose beautiful, often whimsical, portraits and paintings I immediately liked. We spent several months working together to create portraits of one another.

For my portrait of Shanon, I spent two sessions with her, creating unique 8×10 and 4×5 collodion tintypes–a cumbersome, toxic, but extremely beautiful old photographic process with stunning results.

Please join me for the First Thursday opening at the Froelick Gallery in Portland’s Pearl District, June 3rd, 5-8:00pm.

The show runs from June 1 to July 17. The Froelick Gallery is located in the DeSoto Building, at 714 NW Davis. Regular gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10:30am to 5:30pm.