Beauty That Thrives Under the Ravages of Time
February 3 – 26, 2022
I was trained as a psychiatric social worker and worked in that field until 2011. I have been practicing portrait photography since the early 1990s. It has always been my experience that when practiced well, there is a remarkable resonance between these two arts. I have found that the best photographs, like the best therapy, occur when I don’t talk too much, when I engage my subjects with unconditional acceptance and love, when I let go of my desire for a particular result and take my direction from the life that is presented to me. My goal is not to record the glaring beauty that turns every head but to pause long enough that the quiet beauty that waits almost invisibly everywhere one turns, the beauty of experience, sadness, kindness, will be revealed.
In 1999, Washington, DC, Dupont Circle was where the city’s tectonic plates rubbed together; to the northwest were Georgetown and Kalorama, where the big money lived. North was Adams Morgan, packed with ethnic restaurants and growing richer by the minute. South was the K Street corridor, home to PACs, think tanks and law firms. To the east were a few blocks of old brownstone row houses and then past 14th street was old DC, where tourists would stay in their cars. In Dupont Circle, along the long arcs of curved benches that ring the central fountain or sprawled in the grass, the whole city was represented: lawyers and bums, bike messengers, old queers (their lingo, not mine), grad students, waiters on break, smoking cigarettes, sneaking beers, urinating in the bushes. And me, photographing.
Ward Shortridge
Washington DC Portraits, 1999-2004
I recently photographed an old fellow sitting in the South Park Blocks in Portland; he was reluctant but we visited for a while and he slowly let his guard down. After I photograph, I try to provide prints for the subjects, and when he received his print he wrote me the following: “Sir, when you first approached me that day in the park, I was apprehensive… Portland being Portland… but I am totally blown away with your talent Sir. I have never been a lover of my picture (few are) and other than the subject matter (being me) your artistry with your camera is incredible. Thank You. I feel very fortunate that you asked me now.”
This is the true heart and spirit of the project, to bring us to see the priceless beauty that we each embody and that surrounds us every day, beauty that is common to the lives we humans actually live, beauty that thrives under the ravages of time and experience.
Ward Shortridge
Portland Portraits, 2009-2014
More than once in the slow stroll to this community of images I have been approached by homeowners and their neighbors to ask, not with overt hostility but with clear apprehension, “Why are you photographing my house?” These moments could easily have given rise to my own defensiveness, my own diatribe about my first amendment right to photograph wherever I damn well please, but the truth is I’ve been asking myself that very question, over and over again, for months. I’ve come to take this question as an opening of a door rather than a circling of wagons. In return, I invite them to join me in this ongoing conversation in my head.
The first tickle of inspiration came to me disguised as the irresistible scent of fresh urine at the base of a telephone pole somewhere in the Arbor Lodge neighborhood in North Portland. Luckily, I had my trusty pup, Sadie, to recognize it and to make sure I lingered over it until I realized what she was trying to convey, that that moment in time and place was precious, but would only so speak for a short time. There was an easy beauty on the surface that gave shelter to its transient fragility. Very soon, the flowers would lose their petals to make way for the next summer wave, when other flowers would take hold. The kid’s bicycle would grow another layer of rust in its gears, another year of tangled vines among its spokes. Decorative trinkets would remain at their posts on the sills and railings or they would fall. The shadows would seem to pause but forms would slowly change, erasing some, stretching and deepening others. Some visits I would find things in perfect alignment for the making of an image; other visits would plead with me to return, perhaps at high noon or sunset, to see how the changed light or the passage of another year would create another image entirely. “It sounds like you’re talking about people,” one fellow mused.
It sure does. The forces of nature, the effects of time and the passage of life, the tension between openness and vigilance, authenticity and facade, trust and fear, all are familiar to me, as I slouch, year after year, ever forward. I have come to embrace the Butoh dancer’s search for beauty in the rubble of injury, exhaustion, decay. (I make no claims of whether one schooled in actual Butoh dance would recognize the claims I advance here. Most of my thoughts are scraps from here or there, stitched together after the fact.)
These images are culled from fall 2018 – fall 2019, curiously also covering the months of my first stay of any length in a nursing home. As I review them I remember and connect with them and they among themselves. Where I find homes of almost Germanic precision, I remember life as a curled body in a world of straight lines. Age slowly takes its toll and in the image as in my heart I find cast-off auto parts and forgotten toys. At the end, life is a jumble of disparate objects, textures, shadows, broken lines and soothing curves, haphazardly thrust upon and against each other. Laugh or cry, make a sandwich, go for a walk. That part is up to you. Keep your eyes open.
Ward Shortridge
Portland Houses, 2018-2019
This retrospective exhibition, Beauty That Thrives Under the Ravages of Time, comprises work spanning a 20-year period, including the series Washington D.C. Portraits (1999-2004), Portland Portraits (2009-2014) and Portland Houses (2018-2019).
Shortridge was born in 1960 in the Washington, D.C area. At the age of 6 he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. Shortridge earned a master’s degree in social work from American University in the early 1990’s and started a career as a social worker soon afterwards. About the same time he began shooting photos of people he met around Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. He moved to Oregon in 2009 where he continued his social work and photography. Shortridge passed away in December 2019 at the age of 59.
Shortridge said of his photographic process, “The best photographs, like the best therapy, occur when I don’t talk too much, when I engage my subjects with unconditional acceptance and love, when I let go of my desire for a particular result and take my direction from the life that is presented to me.”
The exhibition is organized by Bobby Abrahamson, a Portland-based documentary photographer, who was a close friend and photographic colleague of Shortridge. Abrahamson currently holds Shortridge’s photographic archive.
