Drake Family Spotlight: Bill Lemke — A Story Decades in the Making

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hi, my name is Bill Lumpkkey. I've been a lifelong photographer and a lifelong walkie shaw resident. I spent most of my career doing commercial photography, but all along I've been doing landscapes as well, strictly out of enjoyment. Now, at this point in my life that I'm kind of semi-retired, all I'm working on is fine art photography. This is the camera I typically work with when I'm out in the field. It's called 4x5 view camera. Gets its name from 4x5 in film. Basically, the the technology has not changed since the 1800s. It's still a box with a bellows and I got an assortment of lenses that would go on the front of this. And when I'm photographing, I got to put a film holder in the back, dark cloth over my head so I can see what's going on. The reason I still like it is it slows me down. Plus, the quality is amazing. I've got an image upstairs I took. It's a photograph of a mountain range. There's a tree and there's a cow standing under the tree. On that negative, I can take a magnifier and I can actually read the number on the ear tag of the cow. It's just really nice quality. And I compare shooting film to vinyl album comparing that to a CD cuz I think film has a richness that you just can't get with digital. So anyway, that's the camera I typically work with.

[00:01:15]I do have some other formats, but uh I really enjoy working with this. I did a trip with Carol University and a friend of mine was head of the arts department.

[00:01:24]He took a group of students over. So he convinced me to go along and the only reason I could is because I sent out a message to 10 people saying, "I really want to do this Egypt trip, but I need money." And I said, "My prints are normally like $300. If you give me $200 now, you can pick anything of mine that you want." And I got enough responses that it completely covered my trip. So I went on the trip. It was supposed to be like a chaperone. Last night there, I said to these two guys I was sharing a room with, I said, "Hey, let's get a cab. We'll go out to the to the pyramids and we'll climb the Great Pyramid. You can't do it in the daylight. It's all guards around you." So, we went past the guards and climbed up the corner of the Great Pyramid. And then I made that photograph at sunrise.

[00:02:08]This is a photograph from the top of the Great Pyramid uh with the two students that I took up there in 1985. Now, that's actually me back then when I had hair. It was quite an experience to be up there at sunrise. And there were seven guys waiting for us to come down and they had rifles pointed at us. Well, they wanted $200 a person and I talked them down to $10 for all three of us.

[00:02:28]It's treacherous. The blocks are this high and there's loose sand on all of them and it's not a very big space and I carried a backpack and a tripod up to the top so I could make the photograph.

[00:02:38]But that that photograph paid for all my I went to Egypt four times. It more than paid for all those trips.

[00:02:53]This is my favorite photograph. I made it 40 years ago when it was still Yugoslavia. Still my favorite. I look at it every day for 40 years and I still never get sick of looking at it. The textures of it. I like this curve leading to the center and that there's activity right in the middle of the road. And there's really nothing that lets you know that it's relatively modern. There's no cars in the picture, just a few power lines that run through.

[00:03:18]Other than that, there's nothing that indicates it's anywhere in the the 19th or 20th century.

[00:03:27]At this point in my life, I'm semi-retired, but I still have a passion for doing artwork. most of it being landscape photography, but my latest project has to do with publishing my first book. Started back in the mid 80s photographing dead heads at concerts throughout the Midwest and has kind of transformed into this project where we photographed people in the 80s and then again recently and with our writer David Gans, we put together this book with the stories of what they've been doing for the last 35 to 40 years. If you're interested, go to my website and you can find all the information about ordering a copy of the book. And my website is Bill Lumpky b I lmke.com.

[00:04:07]This point in semi-retirement, I still am physically able to do pretty much anything I want. And therefore, I'm going to continue to travel. I'm going to continue to make photographs. And as long as I can get materials, I'll continue to work in the dark room.