The images have a ghostly quality, their subject matter devoid of most color. But they're still vibrant. Glowing, almost.
John Moredo-Burich knew there was something to these photographs as soon as he saw them.
"I'd never seen anything that spectacular before," said Moredo-Burich, now interim director of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.
Erv Schleufer, a member of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe and a former welder at Kaiser Aluminum's Trentwood plant, had brought in a couple of photos he'd taken at local powwows, and Moredo-Burich was immediately taken. He told Schleufer right there that he wanted to mount an exhibition of these photos.
These were not iPhone photos, using some funky new Instagram filter. Using a retrofitted Canon digital camera and a light-blocking filter on this flash, Schleufer was shooting infrared – radiant energy that is beyond the normal range of vision. He captures, in essence, invisible light.
"The use of infrared photography for such a personal celebration took my breath away," Moredo-Burich said. "The results are just brilliant. And when I started to see the volume of the amount of work he has, I just thought, 'We have to do a show on this guy.' I don't think he was expecting that at all."
He wasn't.
Schleufer, 61, is the subject of a new exhibit, "The Light We Cannot See: The Photography of Erv Schleufer," opening this weekend at the MAC.
Schleufer strictly does his photography as a hobby. A couple of his powwow pictures have been displayed at his favorite hangout, the Casa de Oro Mexican restaurant on North Division Street, for a couple of years. Others have been on display at the Benewah Medical Center in Plummer, and in the North Side business offices of a friend. A photograph of a lineman working in the aftermath of the windstorm in November was published in a newsletter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
He never thought he'd see his photos hanging in a museum.
Of the 44 powwow images in the exhibit, four started as black and white or color, and he edited them to look like infrared, just to see how close he could get it. Those, he said, look pretty good, but compared to the infrared images, "they stick out like a sore thumb."
"These four images I thought really belong with this, as far as being a tribal exhibit," he said. "They were some of my favorite black and whites and I really just wanted to get them in there."
He started playing with infrared in the '90s, but the film and processing was pricey, and you couldn't be sure what you had until you got the film back.
In 2011, his doctor "medically retired" him from Kaiser after job-related stress started causing him severe heart problems. During his long recuperation, Schleufer started to look for something to occupy his time, so he researched infrared photography. When he received his Cobell payments – money from a class-action lawsuit awarded to tribal members in partial compensation for mismanaged Indian Trust funds and land – he decided it was time to upgrade his camera.
He found a company that converts cameras for infrared, and a flash attachment that could block visible light. He loaded up some software to help him edit him images. He did his first test shoot the Julyamsh powwow in 2013.
"I tried to imagine what all the regalia would look like in infrared and I just couldn't," he said.
Even though Schleufer is a Coeur d'Alene, he doesn't have a lot of connections on the reservation. He was born in Spokane, but his family moved to the Port Angeles area when he was young, and he was raised off reservation. He didn't go to a lot of powwows.
As such, he's sensitive to not wanting to exploit the dancers and their artistry. If he takes a dancer's picture and they want to have it, they can. No charge. His other images, landscapes and such, he posts online at http://infrarez.slickpic.com.
When it came time to mount the exhibit at the MAC, he went back to try to find names from the dancers depicted. It took months, but with the help of Facebook users in Indian country, he did it.
He firmly believes he wouldn't be here without a lot of help from social media, his friends, supporters and the dancers themselves.
"It's hard to say it's my exhibit," he said.
Source: Hobbyist captures invisible light of powwow dancers
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