54 Years of Storied Photographs
by Charles R. Lucke

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The stories start with the purchase of my first SLR film camera in 1971 when I was stationed at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma and my wife and I were living in a suburb of Lawton, OK.

I took a photo of my wife Daphne holding my sister’s brilliant Tibetan Terrier, “Heap.” I had the film processed and a print made by a local pharmacy.

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After ending my tour in Oklahoma, we had our first adventure together that would determine if we were indeed compatible. We set up our Saab 99 to be a camper and travelled 18,000 miles around the United States and Canada for three months. When we returned to the east coast we each found a job and our first house to settle into. I found someone to teach me how to process B/W film and make prints in my first darkroom. One of the first prints that thrilled me was a quick shot of Daphne back lit in our dining room.

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I met a freelance photographer who shared her over load of assignments with me and I started journalism style photography which suited me fine when I was selected to travel to Denmark and Sweden to visit the factories that were making the furniture and gifts displayed and sold where I worked at a Scan store in the Falls Church, VA. One of the photos I took while on this training trip was of a potter. The advertising department decided that this photo would be used with their institutional ads in the Washington Post and it became my first published photo.

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Every photograph displayed here will have a story to go with it.

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About the Artist
 

All subjects from portraits to landscapes to abstracts intrigue him. He’s constantly looking for unusual light, shadow, form, or color to photograph. When he records or creates an image and then shares this particular perspective of our physical world with a viewer, his goal is to elicit an emotional response—laughter, sadness, amazement.
 

He’s been experimenting with photography from the very beginning. There seems to be a desire in him to create something that no one else has done, or at least not precisely the way he has done it. It’s a way to free the form and change it from a visual reality to an unreality. It’s a way to free the process from the precise reproduction of tones, colors, and forms and let the right brain reign. He suspects artists Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack have influenced him to push his art in this direction. Maybe it’s just fun to break the rules.

Charles Lucke