Story behind faces

Mark Story knows faces.

In his 23 years as an A-list commercial director Story sat through thousands and thousands of casting sessions.

“I was always looking for interesting faces,” says Story, who specialized in comedy commercials and was one of the first directors to use people who were not professional actors.

“For comedy I fell in love with very old people,” he says. “They were unpretentious, fresh and extremely funny.”

During that time, the now-retired director, established a unique style and comedy esthetic. He made more than 2,500 commercials for such companies as Volkswagen, Budweiser and Little Caesars Pizza.

“He was a kind of the Steven Spielberg of the advertising world,” says Dann Hall, owner of the Hallans Gallery in Sandpoint, where a selection of Story’s black-and-white photographs are on exhibit through Sept. 8.

The 20 images on view are from Story’s recently published monologue, “Living in Three Centuries.”

“The entire time from college to this point,” says Story, 59, “I have had an ongoing love affair, not only with the motion picture business, but also photography.”

In 1987, Story, who has a home in Hope, Idaho, started traveling the world, photographing people with the most interesting faces he could find. He traveled to Europe, Africa, China, Mongolia, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and throughout the United States focusing on ethnic cultures.

“For me it was a relief to go off on my own and find the faces on the planet I wanted to photograph,” says Story, “not the faces my clients wanted to use in their commercials.”

Inevitably the most interesting faces were weathered and worn, some beyond their years.

After two decades, Story has accumulated more than 15,000 portraits.

“As a photographer myself,” says Hall, “I’m amazed that he has taken thousands of portraits and no one has ever said ‘No’ to him. He must be very engaging when he approaches people.”

In the past few years Story has worked with the Gerontology Research Group to locate the oldest living people in the world. He spent the summer of 2005 photographing 21 known supercentenarians (people 110 and older) in the United States; 18 have since passed away.

While Story photographed these superelders, he learned something of their lives.

“I remember the 111-year-old blind black man who lived alone in Oakland,” says Story. “His father stood on the platform next to Abraham Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address because he was the illegitimate son of the then vice president Andrew Johnson.”

“All of a sudden I realized that I was photographing a person whose father stood next to Abraham Lincoln in 1863,” he continues. “I started to cry and got goose bumps because it struck me just how old 111 was, and how far it reaches back in our country’s history.”

Each of the high-contrast, 22-by-25-inch, framed and matted images focuses in tight on the sitter’s face. Story used front or side overhead light to create long, dramatic shadows that accentuate pores, scars and wrinkles.

To protect the privacy of individuals, each photograph has a number instead of the person’s name. Every portrait features a few lines of biographic information including a location and age of the person when the image was taken.

“People are totally captivated by the images,” says Hall.

The project has been picked up by art2art, a circulating exhibitions company that specializes in high-quality photography and works on paper exhibitions.

“It’s quite a wonderful show,” says art2art director Hava Gurevich from her office in New York City.

“It speaks on two levels,” she says, “as a quality, fine art exhibition and as a compelling series of photographs that are accessible to a wide range of people.”

The underlying theme of aging is a universal one, says Gurevich.

“Whether we are young or old,” she says, “aging is something that we are all fascinated with, especially with people who have, in a sense, almost cheated death.”