Artist and activist form partnership to raise funds for Iraqi children
By Kathleen Mellen
Hampshire Gazette, April 14, 2011
Claudia Lefko and Jon Goodman have something in common: perseverance.
Lefko, a Northampton educator and peace activist, has spent much of the past 10 years traveling to Iraq and, when that became impossible, to Amman, Jordan, where many displaced Iraqis live, collecting artwork created by a generation of Iraqi children who have been the victims of war.
Preparing the engraving plate
Goodman, of Williamsburg, singlehandedly rediscovered and revitalized the lost art of photogravure - creating a photographic image in ink on paper from an etched copper plate.
Now the two are combining their talents and their passions to raise money for, and awareness about, Lefko's Iraqi Children's Art Exchange. The independent organization initiates and supports art-inspired cross-cultural projects for Iraqi and American artists, children and youth.
Lefko said it aims to "transcend the barriers of language, culture and politics to create important learning opportunities, foster communication and promote peace and reconciliation."
To commemorate ICAE's 10th anniversary, Goodman has created a photogravure plate using a photograph Lefko took in 2004 of a child and his mother in the Mansour Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad. With the help of Art Larson of Horton Print Graphics in Hadley, he has created 50 broadsides, or posters, which will be on view - and for sale - on Tuesday at A.P.E. at Window in Northampton.
Proceeds from the sale will be used to buy art supplies and to pay an Iraqi teacher for an art program for children in Baghdad at the very hospital where Lefko took the photo.
Because of instability in Iraq, and sanctions imposed on the country by the United Nations, Lefko has been out of touch with the hospital for a number of years; her last trip was in 2004. But now, she says, a new program for children there is up and running.
"We have a staff person working at the hospital. ... It's a cancer leukemia unit. The woman goes in half a day every day. She has art materials, she has games. She spends time there with these kids who are sick," Lefko said.
"I'm trying to work out exactly how this will work because I'm here, they're there," she added. "It's very hard to have a project from across the sea and across the culture."
With the lifting of the sanctions in December, Lefko is hoping to visit the city, and the hospital, once again. To help keep the program there afloat - it costs about $5,000 annually - ICAE recently teamed up with Save the Children, an international nongovernmental organization that helps children in need around the world. She says she expects the association will help the project to grow.
She hopes her association with Goodman will have the same effect.
"I'm always figuring, How do you increase your audience? How do you actually get people to pay attention?" Lefko said. "I thought if you get a fine artist to render this [photograph], then you bring in a whole other audience."
Before Lefko approached Goodman to help with the project, the two had never met. But she knew about his photogravure studio, then in Florence, and decided to make a bold move.
"I basically just appeared at Jon's door one day and said, 'What do you think?' " Lefko said.
She was thrilled, and a little surprised, she says, when he said he'd help.
"I'm always desperate for help to bring attention to the issue. So I was shameless," she said. "Really it was so incredible when he said yes, because on some level I thought, 'He's a busy famous printer.' So it was great. It's humbling."
As for Goodman, he says it is a chance to use the craft he loves for the good of humanity.
"Claudia's doing really important work. I said OK ... because I don't feel like I do much for the world. It was an opportunity," he said. "I wanted to give something back."
A lost art
Goodman developed an interest in photography when he was a teenager. Later, as a student at Antioch College in Ohio, he became particularly interested in photogravure.
After receiving a Watson Fellowship - which required he spend a year of independent study abroad - he went to Europe to learn more about the art. But he was disheartened to find that nobody there knew much about photogravure.
In fact, Goodman was about 40 years too late.
Goodman cleans the plate
With the advent of faster, easier and cheaper photographic development techniques, he says, photogravure had all but disappeared by World War II.
"Nobody in Europe was really doing it. ... The more I started looking into photogravure the less there was about it. This was in the mid-'70s. People knew what it was but they didn't really know how to do it," he said. "It is an old, painstaking, slow process. Printing has evolved into faster, bigger, not as good, maybe. The Europeans were more industrialized. The art part of photography was less on the radar there."
Photogravure utilizes the intaglio printing process, which means the image is actually etched below the surface of the plate, allowing the artist to create tones that are impossible to attain with a more simplified etching technique. "There are microns of variations," he said. "I never found anybody I could learn the whole thing from."
Here's where his perseverance paid off.
In 1976, Goodman was given an industrial apprentice's textbook for heliogravure (the French term for the type of photogravure Goodman does). "It was all in French," he said. Never mind that he didn't speak the language; he rented a print studio, and spent the next six months learning the demanding technique - and the language - from that book.
"I just went there and had at it every day - trial and error," he said. "When I look back at it now, I scratch my head and think, Where did that idea ever come from? ... I was young and naive and needed a job. Or a career."
Now his work can be found in collections worldwide, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York City, and the Bibliotheque National in Paris. He was recently commissioned by the Louvre, also in Paris, to do a photogravure etching of a photograph there. He is recognized internationally as a master of photogravure.
"I thought it was very nervy of me to just even ask him when you hear what kind of work he handles," Lefko said.
Maybe so, but Goodman says it was easy to say yes.
"It's been good for me. It's not the kind of work that I usually do," he said. "A lot of what I do has a rarification and a preciousness. It's good to be able to participate in something that has a direct effect on the world."
Once Goodman agreed to help - he is donating his efforts - he and Lefko pored over hundreds of photographs that she had taken in Iraq, looking for just the right one.
The engraved poster (PDF) incorporating the image
They settled on Lefko's picture of the child and his mother.
"I thought it was the most honorable thing I could do with this photograph," Lefko said. "You're taking somebody's image and you're using it, you hope, on their behalf. To give it the most kind rendering you could do, this seems like the most precious, the most tender way you could deal with it."
Once the decision was made, Goodman created a copper plate for the print and then the prints themselves, teaching Lefko how to assist.
"I just never saw anything like this before. It's just so luscious," Lefko said. "The quality of it is unbelievable."
When Lefko returns to Iraq, she says, she will be proud to take copies of the broadside with her.
"The person in the photograph, the doctors, the other mothers on the unit, they trusted me to take the photograph and then to come back. This is a tribute. To take it back to them to show them - that we have reappeared - has meant a great deal."
About this exhibit
WHAT: "The Photograph, the Artist and the Activist: What, Who and Why?"
WHEN: Tuesday, April 19. A 5 p.m. reception will be followed at 7 p.m. by a talk by Jon Goodman and Claudia Lefko.
WHERE: A.P.E. at Window, 126 Main St., Northampton
MORE INFO: In addition to copies of the broadside, other work by Goodman, as well as art and photographs from the Iraqi Children's Art Exchange will be on view.
Kathleen Mellen can be reached at kmellen@gazettenet.com
