DIANA LUCAS LEAVENGOOD

              My first job, a burden and a joy, was the preserver of family photographs and ephemera. Along with this responsibility came the title of inheritor-of many-an-ancestral-junk-drawer. This one is dangerous for me; it is quite possible that I don’t need a copy of my grandmother’s 1940 tax return but I am not so sure yet, so into the files it goes until a decision or a hurricane happens. Yet, it is through my role as family historian, punctuated at some point by my time in film school, that I came to still photography.  

            The photographs I looked at as a child are etched in my mind’s eye and inform the work I do today.  Perhaps subject matter is hereditary. My great, great uncle, Rollin Cass (1891-1976), was a Doughboy and a gentleman farmer with a passion for photography that he imparted to me through his casual, lyrical documentation of my childhood. He preserved the existence of mirth in my early life, and his images sustained me through a rough adolescence and young adulthood. In turn, I seek to document the lives of others, those dear to me and those unknown. All human beings deserve at least one beautiful photograph of themselves. All human beings deserve at least one beautiful photograph to look at all times.

           I know a piece is done when I get a pleasant shock in my shoulders while looking at the proofs. That feeling is generally fleeting. When my work is going well, I am filled with a sense of dread and guilt because I am descended from Scotch Presbyters, Baptists who used to be Quakers, lapsed Irish Catholics and Swedes who tried to farm the side of a rock strewn hill in upstate New York.

            Diana Lucas Leavengood is an award winning filmmaker who has translated her cinematic background to the medium of still photography. Trained in the dramatic narrative tradition at Cal Arts’ film school, she uses her images for story telling purposes. Working primarily with film and an old-fashioned SLR camera, Diana’s signature double exposure represents an exploration of the intense chaos of the common life in today’s world. Her juxtaposition of seemingly disparate subject matter reveals the mutual thread woven in the narrative of all of our lives. In keeping with her use of antique cameras, her images are not subject to any post-production manipulation.