Background
Lewis Kostiner was snapping pictures before he could walk. Well, not really. But if his parents had given him a camera while he was still in his bouncy seat, he probably would have been.Lewis was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1950. He attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He also attended the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois.
His book credits include that of contributing photographer to the "Court House" by Richard Pare, published in 1976, documenting America's diverse, but stunning, architectural assortment of court house buildings.
His passion for photography, however, was put on the back burner for a number of years while his appreciation of architecturally significant buildings came to the fore. He and his wife, Annie, founded and built their company, Annie Properties, into Chicago's pre-eminent live / work loft rehab and rental companies from 1986 through 2004. At its peak, they had developed over 1.5 million square feet of residential / commercial properties, an art gallery, a children's art program and an ice rink all under their purview.
Upon the sale of all their properties in 2004 his creative flame found new fuel and currently threatens to drive him from his very small studio space. (His investment in the world's premier digital rangefinder camera, the Leica M8, didn't hurt either.) At present, he is working on several projects, one of which is photographing the construction of the Chicago Spire, a Santiago Calatrava masterpiece of design which, along with being destined to be the tallest building in North America, also promises to be one of the world's masterpieces of design, engineering and construction.
The National Fatherhood Initiative is currently but one beneficiary of his generosity and creativity. Lewis spent a weekend in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, photographing fathers and their families and has numerous additional sessions planned around the country, including Milwaukee, San Antonio, Baltimore and Baldwin, Alabama. The images from his Pittsburgh sessions are disturbing in their portrayal of abject poverty yet they move you with the love, innocence and compassion that is clearly evident in the relationship between these single dads and their children. At the same time Lewis' adept understanding of these subjects and composition within the available light suffuses them with beauty that belies the surroundings in the photograph.
When he's not capturing images of holes in the ground or America's disadvantaged, but loving and hard-working, fathers, he spends time in the deserts of the American Southwest, documenting landscapes and objects in the landscape, placed there by human hands. While he feels most of the objects he photographs are quite banal, his use of light and composition, coupled with the skill of his lab, DeltaQuest Imaging, quite nearly compels them to leap from the page.
His work was recently featured in a show titled "Less Than a Year" hosted at Brown University's Hillel Gallery.
