Wm. Stage, Swineherd, National Stockyards, National City, Illinois, 1984, courtesy and © Wm. Stage.
Wm. Stage has packed a lot into his lifetime. He’s been a process server and Army medic, a novelist and newspaper columnist, a father of many and the documentarian of more than a few. Many will recognize his name from his years of writing and photographing for The Riverfront Times, where his weekly “Street Talk” and “Mound City Chronicles” pieces helped define the Ray Hartmann-era publication, though those experiences only hint at the rich life he’s lead as a chronicler of St. Louis, its people and culture.
On Friday night at the Sheldon Art Galleries, Stage will offer up his biggest show to date, a retrospective simply titled Wm. Stage: Photographs and Assemblages.
Ticking off a list of those ingredients, Stage says his assemblages include “shotgun shells, handwritten notes from a long time ago, old advertisements, photographs that I didn’t take, photographs that I’ve found. I know one of them has the narrative.”
A former instructor of photojournalism at Saint Louis University, Stage has been documenting St. Louis since his arrival here three-decades-and-change ago. Since then, “I’ve had a lot of shows, all the way back to the early ‘80s. But not too many in the last 10, 15 years. I wanted to have a really good show sometime in my life, a comprehensive show. I’d always thought about the Sheldon. I approached them a year ago in the fall, gave them an idea of who I am and what I did.
“I now have a studio above a sports bar in Maplewood called The Post. Olivia Lahs-Gonzales of The Sheldon came up there and I’d laid out everything that I had. She wanted to see more. So I spent a couple of months going through my archives, which are considerable. I think I had, gosh, about 120 pictures that I thought were pretty good. I didn’t want anything mediocre in the show, obviously, just the stuff I really like.”
As someone working with old-school traditions, Stage says that, “I hadn’t gotten a whole lot of printing done of my work in the last 10 years. I had done some, but now I had a whole lot of work to get printed. I had to learn the hard way, talking to different printers, that you can’t just give over a negative; and all my work’s on negatives, since I didn’t start doing digital until 2013, when it became more-and-more difficult to work with film. The only two options for me were, first, finding someone to do it the old-fashioned way. It used to cost $10 for an 11x14 print; now it’s $30. The other way is to find someone like NovaColor. They scan the negative and print from a digital file. The ones that they did look pretty good. I ended up going both ways.”
The subject matter of the show is amusingly told by Stage. In essence: photos of people.
“There are celebrities,” he begins. “Known locally, nationally, internationally. If they’re not celebrities, they’re just everyday people in St. Louis. Or somewhere else. There are quite a few recognizable faces in the show. Do you want to hear a few names?” [‘Sure.’] “Okay: Ken Kesey, Robert Mapplethorpe, Whitey Herzog, Steven Soderbergh, the prizefighter Art Jimmerson.”
Wm. Stage: Photographs and Assemblages opens Friday, October 3 with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. (though the gallery will remain open until 9 p.m.). The Sheldon Art Galleries are located at 3648 Washington; for more information, go to thesheldon.org.
