Helping Hand Mirror Mirror
String Theory
Gold COAST
MIRROR IMAGE
For two weeks straight, Andrea and Rob Stone chased down a reflection.
The husband-and-wife photography team became fixated on a glass-walled building visible in the distance from the balcony of their temporary Chicago apartment.
Island Couple Transmutes Urban Architecture into Abstract Art
BY GEORGE SOLTES
“It was so incredible and it kept changing,” Andrea said. “I thought, that’s the picture I want to take in Chicago.”
Day after day, the couple approached high-rise concierges and building managers, searching for a vantage point to capture the image. Time and again they were turned away.
Finally, on their last day in Chicago, they walked past a previously unnoticed Best Western Hotel with an eighth-floor pool deck. “It’s like it dropped from the sky,” Andrea recalled. Expecting to be stopped every step of the way, the duo brought their equipment up an elevator and onto the deck, only to encounter another obstacle: a wall blocking the view. Making use of a janitor’s ladder fortuitously left behind at poolside, Andrea cleared that last hurdle and got the shot.
“Rooftop Dream” Chicago
PHOTOS BY DINAH SATTERWHITE AND COURTESY ROB AND ANDREA B. STONE
The resulting image is a surreal contrast of swirling blue, pink and silver reflections juxtaposed with foreground buildings so sharply rendered that one can read the model number on the side of an HVAC unit. “Rooftop Dream,” taken in October 2011, launched the couple on a photographic journey that has continued ever since.
The Stones wore several different hats before becoming professional photographers. Andrea worked as a psychiatric occupational therapist and clinical social worker and Rob produced and directed documentaries and later became a clinical psychologist. Their jobs brought them together in a decidedly unromantic setting. “We met on a locked psychiatric unit,” Rob said.
During vacations from their home in Davis, California, to Italy and Yellowstone in the early 2000s, Andrea made so many suggestions to her husband about how he should take pictures that he finally handed her one of his cameras and invited her to try it herself. Soon, photography became the purpose for their travel and they both built reputations as landscape photographers.
That changed in 2011. While photographing Portland geese with a new digital system, Andrea suddenly realized that she was done with landscape photography. “We were finding more and more remote places to go, schlepping our film cameras and tripods and lenses,
crossing deserts in the night,” she said. “Some of the pictures were wonderful, but I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’”
Looking up from the geese to the buildings of downtown Portland, she had an epiphany. “I saw these reflections in a different way,” she said. “We downloaded the images and it was like I was on some drug. I was jumping up and down. I said to Rob, ‘This is gonna be something.’”
“Rooftop Dream,” taken a few months later in Chicago, proved her right. The photo won the Grand Prix Juror of Merit Award at the International Fine Art Photography Competition, after which, Andrea said, things “just took off.” The award event in Paris introduced her photos to collectors and gallery directors, she was featured in publications around the world and Lumas, a Berlin-based international art gallery, bought rights to six of her pieces.
”Mylar Metropolis“ Prague
”The Fin“ Berlin
Her work, influenced by abstract artists, including Kandinsky, Mondrian and Stella, straddles the line between photography and painting. “If I could paint with a brush, I would, but I still do stick figures,” she said. “Once we got the digital camera, I felt like I could really paint with the camera.” After a photo is deemed worthy, the image of an often grimy building is digitally cleaned, with dirty pixels painstakingly exchanged for clean ones, a process that may take hundreds of hours. While colors are sometimes corrected or images rotated, nothing is structurally changed. “I just have this thing in my head,” Andrea explained. “I want to do something that’s real but make it better.”
The architectural hunt has taken the Stones across the globe and landed them in a few adventures. At various times, they have found themselves running down a lens thief in Miami, suspected of corporate espionage in Seattle, having their cameras confiscated in Chicago and scrubbing the exterior of a museum in Barcelona.
After their Davis gallery was shut down by the onset of the COVID pandemic, the couple relocated to Bainbridge Island. They recently debuted Stone & Stone Fine Art Photography, located on the lower level of their Ferncliff home. The gallery is open to the public every Friday and Saturday from noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment.
Now settled into their new space, both Stones are percolating ideas for new projects. Whatever they do, they’ll do it together. “There’s a complementarity in the whole partnership that makes it great and fun and productive,” said Rob. Added Andrea, “I don’t know if anyone’s accomplished anything wonderful without having somebody there.”
“Enigma” Evolution of an Image
“In summer 2018, I came across this building at the University of Lucerne. Shadows were falling on the structure’s outcroppings, creating an interesting abstract graphic design. I thought the image had potential, but it took some work to get it to match my vision.”
–Andrea Stone
Original capture
Crop
Rotation and color correction
“Layer Cake” Houston