Innovative local photographer Bob Witte

Under the Radar

Bob Witte gives depth and substance to traditional modes of photography

The South Bay has many talented artists, but surely one of the finest is someone you may not have heard of. That’s largely because Bob Witte, who lives in Redondo Beach, doesn’t often exhibit, doesn’t toot his own horn on Instagram or Facebook, and much of his work doesn’t reproduce well.

A recent online auction provides a good example of the latter. There was a low minimum bid for one of Witte’s 3-D transparency collages but no one bit, or bid on it. Why? Because on the usual computer screen it lacked depth, and if you hadn’t seen the work in person or if you weren’t familiar with the artist, you’d have skipped right over it. And, yes, lost out on a real prize.

Witte was born in Omaha, raised in Kansas City, and educated in Lincoln, but he’s lived in the Los Angeles area for over 50 years. Now in his late 70s, he’s a retired engineer who’s been seriously pursuing the art of photography for more than 40 years.

Now, it would be easy to think, Oh, if he’s that old then he must be settled in his ways and simply repeating himself. And you’d be wrong.

“If you want to be an artist,” he says, “you should be open to all things. I found a way to incorporate sculpturing into photography. It’s not that I intend to be a sculptor, but there are ideas there, disciplines there, that I can learn from.”

To quote from Witte’s biography, “He considers himself to be an experimental photographer producing montages and collages in both two- and three-dimensional formats.”

Stepping beyond the traditional

Bob Witte spent a couple of decades taking black-and-white landscape photographs that have the appeal and quality of prints by Minor White or Edward Weston. “After 20 years I was quite good at it,” he says. “But everybody else in the world was too.

“So I decided to branch out and try other things, to experiment, which I’ve been doing for the last 20, maybe even 30 years. And I’ve come up with a series of works that I think are interesting and novel.”

Essentially, Witte moved away from conventional, documentary-type photography, of the kind which, he says, is “copying something that exists in a moment of time.” He points out that while many or even most people consider photography to be an art, “there are painters, sculptors, that don’t consider photography to be an art because it’s a mechanical process in their mind.

“My goal,” Witte continues, “what I’ve developed over the last part of my career, is to try and expand this bridge between what people think is art (as painting and sculpture) and photography. I found this technique to take two (or more) photographs and to combine them together using digital techniques to create something new that doesn’t exist in the real world.”

That in itself may not strike one as revolutionary. After all, photographers have been manipulating images from about ten minutes after photography was born in the 1830s.

Witte’s montages are created by combining multiple black-and-white scanned negatives in Photoshop to create abstract images, but one of the places where his work gets interesting is when elements from the montage are separated into layers, each layer printed onto clear transparent film, and then mounted with spacing in between each layer. The result is a bit like a Joseph Cornell-inspired hologram. Sometimes Witte puts a reflective surface behind the layers or strata of transparencies and the effect is of a mysterious light emanating from the depth of the work and reaching up to the viewer.

“The lighting is a very delicate, very complex, very time-consuming thing,” he says, “because your eyes are binocular. And I’m always fighting that.”

The three-dimensional transparency collages are also reminiscent of 19th century daguerreotypes which the viewer needs to shift this way and that in order to find the best angle, or to revel in all of them if he or she so prefers.

In years past, Witte says, when photographers looked into their viewfinders and snapped a picture they often had a good idea, or an expectation, of how the printed image was going to turn out.

That, however, is not how Witte approaches his own work. What he says is, “Take photographs not for what they are but for what they can become.” And how does he go about this? “I just take a random walk through my negatives, through my images, combining them in different ways until I find something that excites me.”

That’s how how many of his montages come to be.

And other explorations

“What I found out is that some of my montages make excellent three-dimensional transparency collages and some of them don’t,” Witte says. And some of those that do not? They lend themselves to work in another series, the three-dimensional construction series that Witte refers to as additive reliefs in which he makes several identical prints, cuts them apart, and then mounts them using dowel posts or foamcore to separate them. The effect (again going back to our binocular vision) is of depth and levitation. There’s also some resemblance to what we may find in an elaborate pop-up book, only these works tend to be more abstract and less conventional in appearance.

I should point out two things that elevate Bob Witte’s work: The quality of his materials (let alone the care that goes into the construction) and the presentation. Referring specifically to his additive reliefs, he says, “I pay as much attention to what’s on the back of it as to what’s on the front.” There’s a craftsmanship here, born of an engineer’s attention to detail and precision and the sensibility of an artist.

That craftsmanship is also on display in the handmade books that he has designed and constructed. Many of these unique artist books (and, again, made from the finest materials, top quality cloth, paper, acid-free glues, and so on) can fit on a bookshelf alongside your average, store-bought novel or biography, but when opened many of them are simply inset with a single artwork, most often one of the three-dimensional transparency pieces. That way, they’re easier to store and easy or easier to preserve.

“Also,” Witte says, “they’re very intimate. They’re not like something on a wall… These you can hold at any angle that you want and really inspect them at close range. It’s just like the feeling you have when you read a book.”

It’s like each enclosed artwork is tucked into its own private sanctuary.

There have been other explorations as well, including the Photogami series that Witte created in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. These small and intimate photographs with a Japanese-style allure and aesthetic to them were produced by in-camera, multiple exposures of backlit, registered cutouts that were made in separate sheets of opaque paper. I’m reminded of one of Witte’s key observations: “Light is the catalyst for photographers. Vision is their indulgence.” The Photogamis aren’t conventional images, but then again very little of what Bob Witte has been doing in recent years is conventional.

In conversation, the names of various artists and photographers come up, from Wassily Kandinsky to James Welling, and Witte is asked about who has impressed or inspired him along the way.

“I don’t think there’s any one name in particular,” he replies. “I think everything goes in your head, in your brain, and somehow it gets absorbed and comes out later… and you don’t know when and where or how.”

Despite his singular work, Witte frequently visits galleries and museums, most often with his friends and fellow artists Mariann Scolinos, Winston Marshall, Allen Bollinger, and Michael Rich. “We all have different disciplines of art that we do, and so we all have a different viewpoint on the things that we see,” and afterwards they’ll spend time discussing what they liked, didn’t like, and why.

As for his own artistic reputation and even legacy, Witte says, “I think that all artists, especially if they’ve been at it as long as I have, want to get some sort of validation from the art experts, if you will. Hopefully what I’m doing is of the caliber that’s deserving of it. You don’t know until something happens.”

One hopes that something does happen, because Bob Witte is too deserving of an artist to remain unseen and little known.

He can be contacted at (310) 376-2022 or by emailing r1w2i3t5t8e13@verizon.net. ER