Through a Lens

[announcer] "Art Loft" is brought to you by... [narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners, and the Friends of South Florida PBS.

[narrator] "Art Loft," it's the pulse of what's happening in our own backyard, as well as the taste of the arts across the United States.

In this episode, "Through a Lens," we catch up with photographers Linda Ianniello, Reginald Cunningham, and Lisa Leone, all using their lens for exploration and education.

You'd never know it, but every night in the waters just off the palm beaches, there's an incredible show with an unexpected star, zoo plankton.

As the tiny sea creatures come up from the depths of the ocean to feed near the water surface, underwater photographer Linda Ianniello captures fantastical almost otherworldly visions.

It's a dive specialty known as blackwater photography.

People are in awe at what's out there, I think.

And I think they're also in awe at how small it is.

Everything is, the vast majority is an inch or smaller, and so it's eye-opening, the detail and the the fins these thing have, and the filaments and everything, and the gorgeous colors.

Some of them have just stunning colors and you wonder why.

There's a sea butterfly that has appendages that look like leaves.

Absolutely like leaves.

So things like that I think are fascinating, and you get people thinking about stuff like that.

And that plus the pretty pictures helps.

My name is Linda Ianello.

I'm an underwater photographer.

I've been diving for over 30 years, taking pictures.

I am also the co-author of "Blackwater Creatures," which is a book devoted to the subjects found on blackwater dives in southeast Florida.

Myself and Susan Mears have developed this book for educational purposes so people doing these dives will understand and learn about what they're seeing.

I usually say it's the most challenging underwater photography there is.

Because of that, you can't stay in one position.

Your subject is constantly moving.

They don't wanna be seen.

So you come along with these big lights shining on them, and they may book to the surface or book to the bottom, and they very seldom freeze.

So, you're chasing the subject, and basically what I end up doing is shooting probably 20 or 30 shots until I lose it.

Every one of these has eyes.

And it took me a while to realize that, oh, there's eyes, and if you're shooting something with eyes you should get the eyes in focus.

Well, I swear these little guys know, and you shine your lights on them and they turn their back.

And they're very small.

The shell portion, the center portion, is gonna be like the size of your little fingernail.

So it's really hard to know if you're shooting the eyes or the butt.

So this is another example where you take a whole bunch of shots and try for the eyes and try to get them in focus and do your best.

[speaker] All right, Linda's got her camera, she's ready, she's going.

Linda is in.

These creatures are small.

They're one inch or less.

A lot of them are transparent, so they need a lot of light to take the pictures, and to focus.

They're hard to focus.

So I'm hunting with those lights and using them to focus.

I just focus on the stuff that's in front of me, 'cause I shoot everything.

I'm shooting all of the little creatures I can find.

It's not like muck diving where the subject's gonna sit there and let you take your pictures.

These subjects are moving constantly.

It's gorgeous.

They're just gorgeous.

So there is a definitely a degree of art in these subjects.

The scientists have been a tremendous help, because we started out, we didn't know anything about these, and there were no books on blackwater subjects, except for a few scientific ones were drawings, and it's very hard to correlate a drawing to a live animal.

Couple of the fish scientists started telling us what they were, and three or four of them will start discussions and then eventually someone would say, okay, this is a species.

So it evolved with tremendous help from the scientists.

And then once we got a couple years into it, started communicating directly with scientists, and I provide images for scientific papers.

Anybody that wants any of my images for papers or publications, whatever.

So we built up this rapport with fish scientists and a lot of gelatinous zooplankton people.

So we've got pretty good IDs on those kinds of things.

My whole goal is to help science.

The other thing is make people aware of this environment, because we don't know what's there, and it all has a purpose.

From the very beginning I wanted to know what I was shooting, and I started keeping pretty good records of everything that the scientists were telling us so that I would know, looking back, what that was and who said it, and et cetera.

When we were doing these dives about a year or two in, people were coming and doing the dives, and they were excited, but they get back on the boat, and they say, "I don't know what any of it was.

"I saw all these things but I don't know what it was."

And so we started thinking, okay, we're starting to build up enough images and enough information that we could put together a book that would help.

And specifically for our area, it's strictly things found here.

And I would write up little information about things.

So I didn't want just pictures.

I wanted information and education.

So the more attention I paid to these, I started to build up this resource.

And so we thought, okay, we can do this, we can do this.

And it's worked out.

I think it's helped a lot of people, new people, and it's helped people maintain their interest, that, yes, they can learn about these subjects.

And it's fun on the boat, too, now, that people come up from a dive and I talk to them and I say, "What did you see?

"This is a test, what did you see?"

And we'd go get the book and figure it out.

So it's been very challenging, but it's been productive, and I think hopefully it served a purpose.

[narrator] Washington DC based photographer, Reginald Cunningham, has made a name for himself, tackling subjects through a social justice lens.

Here he works with the Boca Museum to celebrate the palm beaches' first black neighborhood.

Pearl City mirrors what you see in a lot of cities around the country.

Historically Black city, at one time was a very populated, bustling area, very community-focused.

And they built a road right through the middle of it.

And over time, the city has kind of become more and more run down and people have forgotten about it and drive right through it.

My name is Reginald Cunningham, and I am a photographer from Washington DC.

I was brought to South Florida to work with the Boca Raton Museum of Art on some type of exhibit.

Through our discussions and a couple meetings, we decided to focus on a historically Black part of town called Pearl City.

Pearl City actually predates the founding of Boca as a city.

There were a lot of farms in this area.

Pearl City is actually named after the pearl pineapple, and there were a lot of pineapple farms here, and so there was a lot of work to be had here.

And so what happened was that ad went into the paper, and a lot of Black families from Georgia, from Alabama, from South Carolina, moved down into this area and bought plots of land.

The plots of land were not as desirable and more expensive and smaller than what they offered white settlers in the Boca Raton area when they founded the rest of Boca.

But, so often in history, Black folks have been denied land ownership.

So if this was an opportunity to own pieces of land that you lived on and worked on, these families obviously didn't want to pass that up.

A lot of their descendants still live on those same plots of land.

Coming into this project, I wanted to photograph everyone in front of their home.

I quickly realized that a lot of the people just don't live in the Pearl City area anymore.

There's still a lot of people that do, but a good population of people grew up, went away to college or to work and live in surrounding areas like Delray Beach or Miami.

And so the people who I could get in front of their homes, I did.

But there's a community garden in Pearl City right across from Ebenezer Church, and in that garden there's also a butterfly garden there with these nice archways and things like that.

And it's just a really beautiful, beautiful area that reflects the same idea of community that the people there reflect.

I'd like to thank artist Reginald Cunningham and Dr. Candace Cunningham.

I worked with Dr. Candace Cunningham, who's a historian from Florida Atlantic University, and so she recorded about 11 or 12 oral histories.

And so they took some snippets of those and put together a loop that you will hear whenever you're in the gallery, and many of them people that you see pictures of where they're telling about their upbringing or their experiences in Pearl City.

What I wanted to do with my oral histories is get a sense of what has happened since then, so what has happened since it's founding.

And also get a sense of what is a thing that's enabling the citizens of Pearl City to retain their property and to retain this sense of community that they have?

And I also wanted to get a sense of what their outlook was for the future.

And so I think the importance of collecting those stories is that they are now available for posterity.

We know this history.

But also we know what those residents want for their future.

It's very difficult to get neighbors to actually tell their story.

So it was very interesting to move around the neighborhood with Reginald and hear some of the stories.

Some of the stories I had never heard before from some of the people in the neighborhood.

And they were giving first-time interviews, which I thought that was exciting, too.

Telling their stories about how they grew up, how was life, what are they doing now.

It is important to know the story and to respect where you live.

So we spend a lot of time trying to tell the history of Pearl City to all of the residents in that community.

They don't know the history.

I encourage people to not only come to this exhibit with a mind for action, but to also research Pearl City, one, 'cause it's in their own backyard, but these types of communities exists everywhere.

Hopefully what my desire is, is for people to see these and for this to humanize what some of that struggle is.

'Cause on one hand you can hear, oh yeah this area is being gentrified.

But then when you see a person who that directly affects and you hear that person telling their own story while you're looking at this personal portrait of them, hopefully that kind of puts a little fire in your belly to do something.

When you look at them, I see pride.

I see pride.

And in my heart...

I know that they got a chance to get their message out there and to tell their story.

[narrator] Photographer and Emmy-winning filmmaker Lisa Leone steps in front of the camera to take Commissioner back to her early roots in hip hop.

Okay, okay, okay.

This is the part I don't like.

My name is Lisa Leone, photographer and filmmaker.

Fab Woods is up in Chicago, Fable up in Rock Steady Park.

Oh, there's Lauren.

Just a little Lauren Hill.

And that's Q-Tip.

Oh look, there's me and .

some Biggie stuff.

Oh, with Mary and Misa were there also.

I was born in the Bronx.

There was a lot of movement, lot of rhythm, a lot of, back then you could just be like bye and you just go out in the streets.

There was no play dates.

So I just remember we were always on the move.

And when it was time to decide where to go to high school, we didn't wanna go to our local high school because people were getting stabbed, and it was bad.

And we're like, "Where can we go?"

We said, "All right, let's apply to Art and Design."

And I knew I was moving to New York City, and I said, "I'm gonna apply in photography," and then I got in.

We were off to the city to go to Art and Design, which is really the high school of graffiti and break dancing.

I didn't know that at the time, but it was the mid 80s, and there was Fable and Mayor and Doze and Crash, and a slew of people that I met and it was like, just came into home.

I love moments like this.

You got Flash and Daddy-O.

It's just a moment of... That was at Rock City Park.

Jodeci.

Latifah.

Guru in Paris.

Mode 2, big graffiti writer.

Yeah, just hanging out.

I was not aware that I was in history.

But I wasn't aware in high school either.

It was just what we did.

It was a community.

So Fab would just call me and be like, "Yo, I'm going to do this Snoop video.

"Get yourself to LA and come hang out."

Or Hype and Malik are like, "We're shooting Biggie, Big Papa, "down the block from your house, "why don't you come through and take some pictures?"

It was like that.

There would be no artistic practice for me without my community.

The Commissioner offers community.

I wanted to be a part of that, to turn people on to art and form a community of artists.

Because now, more than ever, they need to be supported.

Somebody who started in Commissioner when they were in their 20s that they bought in, they could be looking at that same artist and following all these decades their trajectory, and supporting them by buying their art.

That's a beautiful thing.

[narrator] Locust Projects is celebrating its 25th year of giving artists the opportunity to create groundbreaking, large-scale immersive works in Miami.

The arts nonprofit is getting bigger, doubling its space with the move to Allapattah.

They're also creating films about the work they're doing, like this one.

For Locust's 25th anniversary, one of the things the board wanted to do is find a bigger space for Locust so that we can expand our impact.

So this new space is really significant for Locust Projects.

We are an alternative art space, and that means that we're an expansion or extension of an artist's studio.

We invite artists to come into our space.

They get 24/7 access, and they're able to build their exhibitions in the space.

So this new space, this new building, actually doubles the size of our current location.

Locust Projects was founded about 25 years ago by three working artists, and they had this vision about opening this space for artists to make whatever artists want to make without any obligation of a commercial success.

And it really is a nice thing that you can let your, I always say, freak flag, fly at Locust, because you can.

My experience working with Locust Projects has been one of the best.

It's rare that an institution really gives you the kind of freedom and budget while being an emerging artist.

And I think it's very valuable.

So Locust Projects is special.

We are unique in the arts ecosystem in the way that we support artists to experiment, to take risks, and realize ambitious and large-scale, site-specific projects.

We're not a precious space.

So we've actually invited artists to jackhammer our floors, to have working kilns in the space, even above-ground swimming pools for synchronized swimming.

Pretty much anything that artists want to realize to push their practice, we're here to help them realize.

There's no coincidence that I'm showing at a space like Locust, because they understand the importance of community and the importance of accessibility to art.

So we're really excited to be in this new space, to allow artists to have bigger exhibitions, we'll increase our public programming, and it'll be a big space for the public to come to see what Locust is doing, hang out, and have a great time.

[narrator] And finally, we note the passing of legendary eco artist Mira Lehr, and we celebrate her work spanning over six decades in Miami and beyond.

Please enjoy this encore visit with the artist in her Miami Beach home studio.

The beauty is very important to me, but I have to take the bloom off the rose.

I'm Mira Lehr, I'm an artist.

All of my work has burning of some kind in it, and I think it does reflect both sides of creation, creation and destruction.

And that's what nature is all about.

It's always related to the environment.

I always drew when I was a little kid.

I never really knew I would be a professional artist.

As I grew older, I decided I was gonna study art history in college.

I was so lucky, because at the time I graduated the abstract expressionists were holding forth in New York, and it was a major movement.

So I was right in the middle of this really wonderful scene.

So from then on I did art, and I was not really into the environment as much in the beginning.

I just did nature, a lot of nature studies.

But eventually I heard of Buckminster Fuller, a man who was very much about the planet, and I saw an opportunity to work with him.

In 1969, I went to New York and I worked with him on something called the World Game, and that was about how to make the world work in the most efficient way and doing more with less.

So from then on I was hooked.

I'm feeling two urgencies.

One, I'm getting older, that's an urgency.

How many years do I have left?

And the other urgency is how many years does the planet have left?

So we've converged.

Every day I get up rarin' to go.

The Orlando exhibit, it was called High Watermark, because that's where we're at, and that's where they felt my career was at.

So that show had very, very large sculptures of mangroves, and you could walk through the mangroves and feel you were encased in the roots, the root system.

I loved doing it.

It's a big...

The smaller I get and the older I get the bigger the work becomes, it seems to me.

And so now I'm back in the studio, and I'm turning to something I'm calling Planetary Visions, because I'm doing images of earth masses.

I've also added writing, which some of it is from Bucky Fuller, about the planet.

Some of it is just poetry about nature.

I've always felt abstraction is the highest form, even though I like representation.

But to me, abstraction gets the essence, the essence of everything.

And you can take it and go on with it.

And it's more spiritual to me.

I think, like Cézanne, at the end of his life his paintings became kind of dissolved in light, like light entities.

At the end of Rembrandt's life also, his work became less literal and more also dissolved in light.

So light is very important, and that, to me, is the height of it.

If you have a a light entity in your work I think it's profound and meaningful.

The light on the big sculpture, yeah, those are special lights that grow corals in the laboratory, and the sculpture is a shape of a wave, and it's mesmerizing.

You know, if the world pulls apart, and people are concerned just with their little everyday existence, I don't see a great future, but I'm hoping there's still time.

The clock is definitely ticking.

And I'm not a politician and I'm not a scientist.

The way I can express it is through my art, and that's what I'm trying to do, along with having a wonderful experience making it.

[narrator] Find full episode, segments, and more at artloftsfl.org and on YouTube at South Florida PBS.

[announcer] "Art Loft" is brought to you by... [narrator] Where there is freedom, there is expression, the Florida Keys and Key West.

[announcer] The Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor, and the Board of County Commissioners, and the Friends of South Florida PBS.