THE DAY OF THE LOCUST

I was asked to illustrate the artist’s edition of The Day of the Locust for the venerable Arion Press. The story is set in 1930s Hollywood where being hungry and desire were two faces of one coin. I wanted us to feel the silence I imagined in the depression in a city full of people who’d never make it through the studio gates. The people who’d never be heard or remembered. They were the audience in the theaters.

The actors I chose to play the parts were mostly strangers to me. I met Faye Greener when Sarah Cabral sold me a dress. Jan Halpern was poised to steal a piece of vintage clothing (I thought) and I saw Homer Simpson in the flesh. I can’t imagine better players in this story.

“How brilliant the staging of the completely artificial ‘natural light’ and the completely awkward ‘natural poses’ in Gray’s photographs. It’s a perfect equivalent for what’s so awful and heartbreaking and beautiful in West’s novel.”
– Robert Hass, American Poet Laureate

“You don’t have to page back and forth between the text and the photographs; the pictures glow in the reader’s mind from first sight.”
– Greil Marcus, Cultural Critic, Rolling Stone Magazine, Village Voice

PUBLICATION

Arion Press, Artist’s Edition, foreword by David Thomson, 2013

Brick 92, selected images, Winter 2014

EXHIBITIONS

Mechanic’s Institute Library, Dramatic reading with Photographs, directed by, San Francisco January 22, 2014

International Fine Print Dealers Association, New York City October 25 – 28, 2013

GRANTS AND GIFTS

Holly Goldberg Sloan and Gary Rosen, Billy Weber, Barbara Katz

COLLECTIONS 

Achenbach Collection, Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Special Collection, Getty Museum Research Institute Library

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

William and Margaret Hearst III; Philip and Jamie Bowles; Shaari Ergas; Holly Goldberg Sloan and Gary Rosen

SWINTON CONSTELLATION

The first four images are from pictures I took of Tilda Swinton and her family at what was then her new house in Scotland. They are 20 x 24 inches when printed. The second set of images are from an exhibition of montages I took of her that were projected on City Hall in San Francisco – the north and south outside faces of the building for a week when she came to give the State of Cinema Address at the San Francisco International Film Festival. They are 40 x 50 inches when printed.

This series is just a fat love letter to the actress who is someone that lifts anyone who knows her into the stratosphere of intelligent kindness, and inventive play. There is no one I’d rather talk politics with. When you are in her sphere, and that of her wonderful family, as I was for a couple of years making these pictures, you feel cosmically lifted. She is a star, and I mean celestial.

“Gray has made dreamy digital collages, combining her color images in a manner that’s more Magritte than Warhol, with a hint of ‘occult’ trickery. Gray’s project gives the images a special radiance as City Hall feminized like a model in this cross-dressing town, becomes something similar to an actress who assumes a role or tries on costumes.”
– David D’Arcy, Artnet Magazine.

PUBLICATION

Archipelago.org, Big Tilda’s to music by Greil Marcus, 2007-Present

Brick Magazine, Honor at the Stairs, Cover, Spring 2007

Photo Review Magazine, Xavier’s Tour de Nairn, Honor at the Stairs, 2006

EXHIBITIONS

San Francisco International Film Festival, Big Tilda’s projected images City Hall, north and south faces, 2006<

Audis Husar Fine Art Gallery, Tilda Swinton on Fire, Los Angeles, 2006

REVIEWS

artnet.com, Big Tilda by David D’Arcy, 2006 Read more

Tango Me Close

I showed these pictures at Jernigan Wicker Gallery in San Francisco which was on a side street in an old flag factory. To enter there was a vacant floor with a staircase to the large room where the pictures hung. I hired a tango trio to set the mood at the base of the stairs. Tangeros, some of whom were in the photographs, never made it up those stairs. They are so readily moved to dance, it’s like a sleeping giant inside each of them that wakes with the sound of the accordion and maybe a violin and a cello as there were on that evening. And the lucky art viewers walked through dancers in action which put them in the mood to appreciate my take on this tight knit international community.

EXHIBITION

Mechanics Institute Library, San Francisco, 2002

Jernigan Wicker Fine Arts, San Francisco, 2001

Naming the Homeless

This was my first public art project. I hired thirty-three people without a home to let me photograph them where they slept at night, and again after they had been made over to look ready to work. I called it Naming the Homeless because the idea was that if we knew their names we might appreciate them as our neighbors. I interviewed the participants about their careers and what they hoped to do in the future and wrote it on the mats of their “Before” pictures. I hung the photographs in the nave of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco at Christmas time. 50,000 people visited the church that season and saw the images. There was television coverage and there were newspaper reports. Eight of the participants in Naming the Homeless got jobs.

I was invited to have the show at Yale University and they had me give a talk. The governor of Connecticut came and he invited the show and me to the State Capitol in Hartford. Then the show came to City Hall in San Francisco.

God and Chance

Is “The Loneliest Road in America” a place for rebels or crazy, dangerous outsiders? You never feel safe in Nevada. It’s a state where extraterrestrial life is invited. And it’s a desert where they let bombs be tested and then used as tourist sites where the guide tells you earnestly that the radioactive material stays in the hole. And it’s not just everyone else that frightens you, the fear is exasperated there that you might discover risk feeds you and that you wish you’d never heard of Las Vegas. I am a portrait photographer so a desert without a road is just land.

I used Linhof 612 and 617 panoramic cameras and so the silver gelatin images are powerful in 80 by 72 inch prints. They are also in the book “In Nevada: The Land, the People, God and Chance” by my husband, David Thomson.

PUBLICATION

Alfred A. Knopf, In Nevada: The Land, The People, God and Chance by David Thomson, 1999

EXHIBITIONS

Jernigan/Wicker Fine Art, San Francisco 1999

GRANTS AND GIFTS

Maurice Kanbar

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

Alicia Hammarskjold, William and Margaret Hearts III

Keep Christmas Well

In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol.” The story was so popular that it transformed a religious day into a holiday dedicated to generosity of spirit, heart and purse that lives to this day. The story is about Ebenezer Scrooge who is taken by ghosts in the night to see his past reenacted, his present interpreted, his future imagined, so that he may be moved to transform himself into a man who can give himself to others and take part in this glorious celebration once a year.

In this interpretation of the classic, it is as if the story were being read by the actor playing Scrooge to the photographer’s alter ego as a child. Further, it has been observed that Fred, Scrooge’s nephew and charge as a boy, grows into a man who is everything the old man should be if only he would notice.

PUBLICATION

L’Oeil de la Photographie, Trying to Tell the Story, March 30, 2017

EXHIBITIONS

Lobby, 117 West 123rd Street, Harlem, 11/2017 – 1/2018

AWARDS

Winner, 2017,”Trying to Tell the Story,” International Color Awards,  Los Angeles, Fine Art Nominee

Winner 2017,”Dressing for the Dance,” International Color Awards, Los Angeles, Fine Art Nominee

GRANTS AND GIFTS

Lili Anolik, Kathy Bole, Francis Bowes, Jamie Bowles, Leslie Walker Burlock, Alison Carlson, Margaret Charnas, Penny Coulter, Christine Cuccia, Karen and John Diefenbach, Carol and John Field, Anne Fredericks and Marc Fasteau, Carole Shorenstein Hays, William and Margaret Hearst, Martha Kropf, Chris Meledandri, Karen Meyerhoff, Jane Reed and Larry Reed, Sue Rugtiv, Holly Goldberg Sloan and Gary Rosen, Dianne Weaver and Sebastiano Scarampi

Central Valley Foreclosures

The brilliant journalist, Marilyn Berlin Snell, got the idea of following Dorothea Lange’s trail through the Central Valley of California where the most foreclosures were happening in America in 2010. The first time we met a couple in their foreclosed on home, I wept when they told us their story. Marilyn advised me to behave more professionally and so we both held back tears until we could drive away and then we let loose.

One of the most surprising moments was the morning we went down for breakfast in a hotel in Sacramento and discovered we were the only guests because it had gone in foreclosure after we arrived.

PUBLICATION

Mother Jones Magazine, 18 Months of hearings, 700 Witnesses – and Barely a Single Homeowner by Marilyn Snell, January 2011 Read More.

COLLECTION

Berkeley Art Museum

Being Blue

This is a story as serious as a silent film and as light as a comic. I based the characters on two people I know and care about deeply. They played themselves for me, to give me a story and I made one I hoped they’d appreciate. They say they do. 

PUBLICATION

Ambit Magazine, London, thirty-six panels, November 2021, pg 17 – 32

AWARD

Art Winner 2021, (first ever) Ambit Magazine, Lon

Leda and the Goose

The child who came from this myth told his bride on their wedding night:
“My step-father said he fell in love with my mother when he saw her pregnant with me.”
And the bride said, “You were his.”
And the groom said, “He claimed me.”
And she said, “And now you are mine.”

Winner, International Color Awards, Birdsong (Untitled 1), Los Angeles, California, Fine Art Nominee 2021

Winner, International Color Awards, Birdsong (Untitled 2), Los Angeles, California, Fine Art Nominee 2021

The Clash

In order of appearance:
Peter Bogdanovich, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Penelope Cruz, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Harry Dean Stanton, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles
Daniel Day Lewis, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Paul Thomas Anderson showing There Will Be Blood, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Peter Sellers, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Rosanna Arquette, Tangled Up in Blue, ABC-Pilot, Los Angeles
Dick Clark, Tangled Up in Blue, ABC-Pilot, Los Angeles
Jerry Rice, Dancing with the Stars rehearsal, San Francisco
Tina Brown touring The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992, Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles
Jerzy Skolimowski, retrospective Berlin Film Festival
Julian Schnabel, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Forest Whitaker and Laura Linney, Telluride Film Festival, Colorado
Anthony Minghella and Walter Murch cutting The Talented Mr. Ripley, Berkeley
Mark Stock painting his Telluride Film Festival Poster, San Francisco Studio

PUBLICATION

Berlin Film Festival, 2010

Telluride Film Festival, 2002, 2006, 2007

“Tangled Up in Blue” Series, Pilot Title Sequence, ABC-TV, 2003/04

The New York Times, Anthony Minghella and Walter Murch cutting The Talented Mr. Ripley, December 19, 1999

Independent on Sunday, Anthony Minghella and Walter Murch cutting The Talented Mr. Ripley, December 1999

Let the Devil Take Me

In most cases I set the situation up and people “played” themselves. The story teller in me waited for conflicts or some turn inside a person’s mind before I’d open the shutter.

PUBLICATION

Communication Arts Magazine: Photography Annual, 1996

EXHIBITIONS

Jernigan/ Wicker Fine Art, Paris, France, 2003

Jernigan/Wicker Fine Art, San Francisco, Early Work, March 3 – April 4, 1998

Anita Seipp Gallery, Palo Alto, Early Work, 1997

Plano ArtCentre, TX, Early Work, July 2 – August 2, 1997

AWARDS

Winner, New Photography Competition, Millard Sheets Gallery, Los Angeles 2000

National Jury’s Choice, Advertising Photographers of America,Taxi!, Los Angeles 1996

Award of Excellence, Communication Arts: Photography Annual, Taxi! 1996

COLLECTIONS

Thomas V. Meyer Fine Art

They Think I’m From Mars

Don’t we all feel like that sometimes?

PUBLICATION

The New Fillmore, A Moment in Time, January 2, 2018

Lucy Talks Movies, Red Without Blue: Mark and Claire Farley, Vlog, June 24, 2007

MEDIA STILLS

“Strange Fruit”, Documentary Directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, 2006

“American Inventor”, ABC-TV, 2006

“Dancing with the Stars”, ABC-TV, 2006

“Tangled Up in Blue” TV Series Pilot, Title Sequence, ABC-TV, 2003/04

EDUCATION

Master Class, Tanya Habjouqa, SF Camerawork, 2019

Master Class, Richard Sands, Aperture, New York City, 2017

Master Class, Michael Kenna, San Francisco Art Institute, 1999

Bachelors Degree with concentrations in European Literature and Film, Dartmouth College, University of New Hampshire, Special Degree Program, 1979

Love Me, Do

“Lucy told me the shoot would last an hour. It lasted twice that because we laughed so much.” – Nancy Carlin

“I have always hated having my picture taken, but I’d do this again anytime, just to hang out with Lucy.” – Leah Edwards

“Being photographed by Lucy is like having the rain stop just before a summer picnic.” – Juliette Amoroso

“Her image reveals me in a way I hadn’t seen; it evoked the thought ‘Now here is someone that I’d like to know!’” – Kelly Pritchett and Remy Ntshaykolo

“I wanted to take her picture.” – Kate Rohrbach