Foreword by Jill Sterrett
It is the everyday world that you could—and you just might— pass by, but for Lewis Koch’s curious eye. The throughline of Koch’s career is noticing. He has been feeding his habit of making photographs, of noticing for more than five decades. It is his way of being alive and responding compassionately to the world.
A would-be archeologist, Koch realized early on that he was not as attracted to the objective methods of recording and analyzing as he was to the possibilities of uncovering metaphoric evidence in the everyday world. He was drawn to a different sort of digging to explore the human experience: reflexive questions, digressive conversations, and deeper meaning that he could frame using his camera to reveal the signs and symbols that are all around us. In the vernacular.
The elemental structures framed in Koch’s photographs endure because they say something about how ordinary people go about doing everyday things. Koch made a picture of a parking lot—gravel in the foreground, a flat brick facade, off-kilter windows, a slice of sky, no ornament except for three small hand-painted signs reserving spaces for Elmer, Randy, and Harv.
What will we talk about when we talk about Elmer, Randy, and Harv? Who are these guys? Koch’s photos make the space for a story that could be the opening scene of a Raymond Carver short story. In exploring architecture, Koch concerns himself with the lives sheltered therein. He resists customary genre types to describe his photographs because they often understate the wider possibilities of seeing.
The presence of people (who may exist by first name only at their parking spots) is as interesting to Koch as the solid volumes of the built environment and the natural world. He casts a level eye on a past and present that isnestled deep within us. It is that distillation—and the subjective representation—that I most cherish in his work.
Ask Koch what he does, and he is likely to question pat vocational labels. He did not think of himself as an artist in the early days—he began using photography in service of grassroots history. Koch made his first forays into documentary work not long after graduating from college with a degree in history. Collaborating with oral historian Clem Imhoff during the mid-1970s, they explored the roots of the African American community in Beloit, and the founding of labor unions in Janesville (both in Wisconsin). It was then, as he discovered archival images to accompany the oral history records, that he came to realize just how subjective one’s understanding of history really is.
Read the entirety of Jill Sterrett's Foreword in Lewis Koch's The Vernacular Seen, Wisconsin 1981.
Jill Sterrett
Jill Sterrett is Director of Collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Before her tenure in Wisconsin, she held leadership positions at the Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), and for 28 years at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Lewis Koch
Drawing upon aspects of photography, sculpture, assemblage and text, Lewis Koch calls attention to the often unremarked upon elements of everyday life. Over the past fifty years, he has presented installations in garages, on kiosks and billboards, as well as in museums and galleries, in solo exhibitions internationally. His work is held in permanent collections which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, and many more.
