At the Sheldon Art Galleries, a One-Man Show for the Late Bob Reuter

First, the good news: Bob Reuter finally has a one-man gallery show of his photography, his first, at the Sheldon Art Galleries. These 80 photographs by the legendary St. Louis songwriter and artist, selected by gallery director and curator Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, are already on display at the Sheldon’s Ann Lee and Wilfred Konneker Gallery, though the opening reception is not until Friday, June 10.

The show, which hangs until September 17, is perfectly titled Grainy Black & White. That’s an apt description of Bob’s taste in photography, borrowed from arguably his best song, “It Don’t Matter,” from his self-released 1994 CD This Much I Know, though performed, with one backing band or another, until his death on August 13, 2013, at the age of 61. “My life is a grainy black and white,” Bob sang until the day he died, “handheld camera jerking all around.”

Grainy, black and white, and handheld would come to characterize the photographs Bob began to make a few years after he first released this great song, but he wasn’t jerking around. He took photography very seriously from the moment he picked up a 35mm Pentax and learned to develop film, at first as an economic alternative to house painting, his day job, which was rendered untenable by a health condition. And, though he captured much frantic activity on film, many thrashing rockers and drunken dancers and amateur boxers, his hand and eye were always steady. It came to define his work, this quiet, steady and approving gaze directed at characters and situations that would unnerve and disturb many tamer people.

Grainy Black & White has many of Bob’s core subjects. First and foremost, he loved to photograph women who have an arresting look. I counted 32 portraits of women (all of them white women from the South Side), and when you add the band and other group photos that also feature a woman, fully half of these 80 photographs include the image of a woman whom Bob surely would have been looking at closely, even without a camera in hand. But, thankfully, he had his camera, and as a result we have these grainy, black-and-white photos of some fascinating women smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol out of plastic cups, dancing on bars, chopping chords on acoustic guitars, flashing torches in the night, and holding handguns.

Bob’s eye also was drawn to quirky men, though not nearly as much as women. I counted 14 portraits of men, not counting the musicians (of which there are far fewer in this selection compared to his work overall). The men photographed here tend to have things on their heads: cowboy hats, hoodies, earphones (on a black man, the only racial diversity in these portraits of a segregated city), protective boxing headgear, pasted-on devil horns. Most of the men share with most of the women—especially if you don’t know them—a jagged, distracted, potentially dangerous look. Bob had a genius for sitting still and capturing the calm, quiet moments of edgy people capable of moving very fast and making an incredible amount of noise.

He also captured motion and sound, mostly from musicians. We have here photographs of the guitar players and drummers and bassists you’d expect from a rock 'n' roller like Bob, but also a male saxophone player (Josh Weinstein looking angelic in a suit) and a female flautist. Included in the show are a number of legends in the St. Louis scene—Jay Farrar, Pokey LaFarge, Fred Friction, Sunyatta McDermott, Mark “Porkchop” Holder of Black Diamond Heavies, those beloved frequent visitors from Nashville—though many more musical faces one would have hoped to see are missing, such as Mark Stephens, Hunter Brumfield III, and the many younger players who rallied around Bob in his fifties and made the last decade of his unfairly short life probably his best.

Bob was capable of shooting a posed shot of someone holding a guitar for his album art (there is one of Jay Farrar included in this show), and he shot plenty of good but ordinary band photos, but his very best photographs of people playing music on stage seem to document them from the inside out: Bob could see past the outward public show to capture the shadow and doubt behind the stage lights. Unfortunately, none of the photographs selected for Grainy Black & White have quite that uncanny quality. That leads us to the bad news, which is that people who have seen a large number of Bob Reuter’s photographs will probably agree with me that this is not anything like a presentation of his best work.

It’s difficult to fault the curator without knowing what she had to choose from. Bob died suddenly, by stepping into an empty elevator shaft that should not have been open, and his work was disorganized at the time of his death. One of his younger collaborators, Chris Baricevic of Big Muddy Records, finally sorted out the rights to all of Bob’s creative work only as recently as this March, two and a half years after his death, and Bob’s friend Tom Huck of Evil Prints has kept his surviving prints in climate-controlled flat files. It’s impossible to know how many of his photographs Bob printed once, sold, and never saw again. From his very earliest days making photographs, I saw Bob pass around stacks of his prints at bar gigs, parties, and guitar circles and sell them on the spot, often for very modest prices; I have about a dozen highly prized Bob Reuter prints that I bought on nights just like that. At the time of his death, Bob planned to bring prints to an upcoming art sale, and when Baricevic and Huck decided to honor that plan, a great many of his photographs went into private collections posthumously. There was no attempt to track down, review, and borrow any of his previously sold work for this show. Of the 80 prints hanging at The Sheldon, only two are on loan. The rest belonged to Bob after he sold everything else.

And they will stay that way, for now. “Artistically, this show was a long time coming, but administratively it was a little premature,” Baricevic told me. For the one posthumous show that was already on the books, Baricevic said, digital copies were made of every photograph put on sale. He said with the rights to Bob’s work only recently sorted out, a careful archiving and documentary process is required before anything he made in any medium is released or sold. A musician who met Bob through music and who runs a record label, Baricevic is starting that long journey with rock 'n' roll—he is presently working on a record by The Dinosaurs, Bob’s punk band from the late 1970s.

So, we will have to wait—who knows how long, maybe forever?—for a more comprehensive exhibition of Bob Reuter’s photographs or a definitive book of his prints. For now, we have Grainy Black & White, which is something to celebrate and absolutely a must-see show, even if many of the people who loved Bob and his work best will go home afterwards to find even more amazing examples of his work hanging on their own walls.

The opening reception of Grainy Black & White will be held 5-7 p.m. Friday, June 10. A gallery talk, Campfire Stories: Memories of Bob Reuter, will be hosted by Tom Huck and Chris Baricevic 6-7 p.m. Tuesday, July 19, where friends of Bob Reuter will be invited to share their memories and stories. Admission is free, but reservations are required. Contact Paula Lincoln at plincoln@thesheldon.org or 314.533.9900 x37. Cash bar.

The Sheldon Art Galleries are located at 3648 Washington. Gallery hours are Tuesdays, noon–8 p.m.; Wednesdays–Fridays, noon–5 p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m.–2 p.m.; and one hour prior to Sheldon performances and during intermission. Admission is free. For more information on exhibitions, visit at TheSheldon.org.