Select a particular work of art to view additional information and images that can be enlarged.
William Lesch has been a working photographic artist for over twenty years. He earned his BFA in photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and worked as the first Staff Photographer at the Center for Creative Photography while pursuing his graduate degree at U of A.
Lesch had his first one-person show in the small front gallery of the newly established Center for Creative Photography in 1979, and since that time his work has been included in over one hundred group and one-man shows, both locally and around the world. His fine-art work is in several museum and corporate collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Snell and Wilmer Collection, the Ryley, Carlock and Applewhite Collection, the Sky Harbor Collection, and both the City of Phoenix and the City of Tempe Portable Works Collections.
He has won and been nominated for numerous grants and awards, including receiving an Artist Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts as well as completing two Artist Project grants for the City of Tempe. His desert color photography was featured in a 60 page monograph printed by Treville Press in conjunction with an exhibit in Japan.
Lesch’s recent Public Art projects include a contract with the City of Tempe, Arizona to create interpretive portraits of 12 notable citizens of Tempe. Using a variety of photographic techniques, the assignment was to express the diversity of culture and people in Tempe. The final result included an exhibit of 20×24 large scale prints at the Tempe Civic Center, which now are a permanent part of the Tempe Portable Art Collection.
Lesch’s maintains an active schedule of shows and exhibits, and his work is represented in Arizona by Etherton Gallery in Tucson and Larsen Gallery in Scottsdale. He also owns and operates a commercial photography studio specializing in architectural, landscape, and commissioned assignment photography.
Lesch has been a meticulous craftsman ever since his early introduction to the work and printing methods of Frederick Sommer and Emmet Gowin, both of whom he met and who became important to his development as an artist. Lesch’s dedication to fine printmaking has carried through from black and white darkroom work, to extensive masking and color adjustment printing cibachrome, to Lesch’s current involvement with scanning and digital printmaking. He makes his own drum scans and prints his fine art prints in house on a state of the art pigment printer, the Epson 9800.
