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 A commercial photographer for more than twenty
years, Lee Isaacs is just now coming to terms with his “place in
art”. While an art student at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham in the mid 70’s, he discovered photography quite by
chance. “In those days, there weren’t enough resources to go around,
so the beginning sculpture students had to reuse the same chunk of
clay every week, for the entire semester. Because we weren’t firing
our pieces, the teacher asked us to bring in cameras to record our
work." A friend loaned him a camera and got him started. It
didn’t take long for Lee to become more interested in framing a
picture in the view finder than in making the sculpture
itself. By the third week he found myself taking pictures for
all the projects in the entire class.
He began to see things in a new way.
Lee was hooked and had to learn more! At that time, UAB didn’t have
a photography program. When he asked the chairman of the department
about photography as an art form, he looked puzzled and replied,
"Oh..., you mean Photojournalism. That’s over in the English
Department, they offer it in the Spring.”
Eventually, Lee Isaacs found a program
in photography at UAB’s Special Studies, where he laid the
foundation for his career. Over time, he's become experienced in
both location and studio settings. His skills have served a number
of industries, which include mining, manufacturing, architecture,
banking, health care, communications, and publishing. Subjects range
from food to product to portraiture, with extensive expertise in
both color and b&w films; in 35mm, 120mm, 4x5 and 8x10 formats
and in more recent times, digital capture and output. Special skills
include extensive work with alternative processes (Polaroid
dye-transfer, color laser image transfer, pinhole camera technique,
and more). He has lectured many students from grade school to
college age and has led a number of workshops in nature photography,
studio and location lighting, as well as alternative
processes.
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