An art enthusiast once asked Will Henry where he had taken a certain photo. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she exclaimed.
Indeed—because the setting depicted in Rush Hour doesn’t exist. Not in one location, anyway. You’d be hard-pressed to find a businessman leaping across a river that happened to flow in place of a city street.
“I like creating things that couldn’t really happen but making them look like they did,” says Henry, ’88. He spent weeks preparing the Rush Hour illusion, digitally cutting and pasting photos he’d taken in San Francisco (the industrial buildings), Yosemite (the backdrop) and Chile (the river).
Rush Hour is one of the few works that Henry digitally altered; usually, he opts for a more traditional double-exposure shot. But the playfulness so apparent in Rush Hour comes through in nearly all his photography. He likes to trick the eye.
Auto Lake, for example, might appear to be an aerial shot of a desert lake that stretches for miles. But look again. It’s actually a close-up of an abandoned automobile that Henry found eroding and collecting dust in the Nevada desert, half-buried next to a puddle that extended all of 8 inches across.
Henry, a sociology major, came to his craft gradually. He didn’t even take a photography class until his final quarter at Stanford. Once out of school, he drifted across continents, sometimes working as a sales rep for his father’s wine company. He took a lot of pictures in those days but never thought photography could be anything more than a hobby.
In 1992, his wife, Jane, convinced him otherwise. A painter herself, she encouraged him to pursue an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Since graduating in 1996, he’s won a number of prizes. Henry is represented by galleries in New York, San Francisco and Palo Alto and at www.nextmonet.com.
At the Art Institute, Henry focused on landscape photography—only his landscapes were a little different from most. “A lot of photographers like to photograph these beautiful, natural places. They tend to point their cameras away from all evidence of man,” he says. “At the same time, you can go to Antarctica and you’ll see satellites streaking through the sky and a Coke can washing up on the beach.” Henry refuses to brush the can aside or tilt his lens away from a corroded automobile. He doesn’t shoot nature in its ideal form. He shows us the world as we’ve made it.
One of his favorite photographs pairs a gorgeous sunset on the Portuguese island of Madeira with a rusted school chair that had been tossed away as junk. The juxtaposition of natural beauty and human refuse mesmerized Henry, but he worried that it might seem overly morose, so he added some levity by naming the piece Sitting Pretty.
Sometimes Mother Nature gets in a laugh of her own. A few years ago, Henry was photographing an old ship’s ladder that had washed up on the beach near his hometown of Davenport, Calif. He was adding the final touches, lighting the last few rungs, when a rogue wave crashed into him and the ladder, knocking them both to the sand. His shoot was interrupted, possibly even ruined, but Henry wasn’t flustered. A longtime surfer, he was used to getting leveled by waves.
The eventual result was Jacob’s Ladder—the glowing image of a crude human construction reaching toward the sky. “I like the way that relates to the human race,” Henry reflects. “We keep building and building and building, and we think we’re going somewhere. It’s a futile effort.”
Andrew Hinderaker, ’01, is a master’s student in English at Stanford.
