To photography professor Joel Leivick, the girl in the SpongeBob SquarePants shirt is a living Botticelli painting with a "sublime concentration on her face." Indeed, each of the visitors he photographed at Rome's Pantheon seemed "lost in a rapturous gaze."
The result is The Rapture, a 45-photo exhibition that will be at the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery through December 8. The show is Leivick's first serious body of work in color, and he's "as excited about some of the prints in here as any I've ever made." The sudden inspiration to document the scene—shot over four days with a small Sony Nex-7 digital camera—"gave me something I couldn't have pre-visualized."
Leivick, who says he's nearing retirement, went to Italy last year contemplating much different projects. Typically he uses large black-and-white negatives to create his pictures, but he was riveted by the way people at the Pantheon appeared to be in thrall to their cameras as well as the ancient temple. When he relied on the same handy technology to interpret them, "I was right in their faces, but no one ever questioned me about what I was doing or why.
"The process has to be paramount for an artist. . . . You have to discover something new in the doing."
