Jim Levison: Shot by a Cop
(03/11/2010) To call Jim Levison’s photographs sensual would be true, but an understatement. The photos from one series in particular,
 Morgan McGivern
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of striped bass feeding just below the surface, the school so thick it could explain Jesus’ watery stroll to the faithless, are downright revelatory.
“I had never noticed that before,” the photographer said while pausing over a 17-by-22-inch print from that series shot in the fall of 2007 within swimming distance of Montauk Point.
What he had never noticed before, despite being a licensed fishing guide, is the delicate lavender sheen transparently superimposed on a striper’s silvery scales. The photograph fixed the moment when five bass broke the surface in pursuit of fleeing bay anchovies, but “broke” the surface is wrong.
Rather, the fish lifted the surface so that they appear under a thin lens of water through which our eyes meet theirs. An extraordinary shot. “There’s a sweet smell and the noise,” the photographer said of finding oneself in the midst of such a feeding frenzy. “Sometimes in a blitz they come up really fast. Sometimes they come up slow. That’s what this school did. I ran into an hour or two of those kind of blitzes.”
Prints from that particular outing are featured on the walls of Estia’s Little Kitchen, a Sag Harbor restaurant not far from where Mr. Levison lives.
In another shot, Paul Dixon, a fellow fly-fishing and light-tackle guide, is captured at the helm of his center-console boat as his client has just cast a fly. Mr. Levison’s telephoto lens foreshortens the scene so that angry autumn waves appear eager to swamp the boat. A gannet wheels overhead, its black-tipped, white wings dipping as the bird searches the surface for fish. Something scary about the photo, very Montauk. You know you’re not in the Bahamas.
Mr. Levison sells his work at craft fairs for the most part. He took his fishing and flowing photos to the annual Long Island Decoy Association exhibit in Patchogue the week before last. He has exhibited with the Artists Alliance of East Hampton and the Montauk Artists Association and in the Providence fishing show, as well as at summer craft fairs in Westhampton and East Hampton.
“I’ve always made money. I get a lot of traffic,” Mr. Levison said with a bit of happy surprise in his smile. His life has taken
Mr. Levison’s photos, such as “Big Mouth,” above, offer a new and different perspective on the nature around us.
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quite a turn.
If you put him in a lineup with five other men and asked a perp to choose the retired N.Y.P.D. detective, Mr. Levison would most likely be the last one picked. The smile is too broad, the frame wiry and un-Dick Tracy. But in fact he was one of New York’s finest for 23 years from 1969 to 1993.
“That was another life,” he said, going on to describe the high point. “My 15 minutes was being the field supervisor in the Bernhard Goetz case.” On Dec. 22, 1984, on the Seventh Avenue subway, the man who became nationally known as the Subway Vigilante shot four young men he said were about to mug him. He was a hero to some, a villain to others, and was ultimately found not guilty of attempted murder.
“We had tips early on, and we had his photo on file because of a prior. We asked a conductor, ‘What do you think about his picture?’ He didn’t identify him, but we put it on the back burner.” Mr. Levison said he went to have a talk with Mr. Goetz at his residence. Bernie Goetz wasn’t there, so detective Levison left his card. The card put Mr. Goetz on the run. He eventually surrendered to police in Vermont.
“It was a photograph,” Mr. Levison observed, that did it. “I was interested in photojournalism. I wanted to do a book of photographs. I even had a title: “Shot by a Cop,” but I never did it” — yet. There’s still time, he said.
The photography bug re-emerged after he began fly fishing in the early ‘80s. “I started in the Catskills like everyone in New York does. I took snaps but was not thinking about publishing them. I bought a van and went west. I was a fishing bum. Then a friend said why not get a captain’s license and charter out of Montauk.”
Mr. Levison started guiding in 1999, and he kept shooting. “All of a sudden I sold one or two photos. I started shooting for magazines, learning how they wanted them.”
The magazine business had fallen on hard times, he said, which has prompted him to create a Web site: Jimlevisonphoto.com. He has expanded his outdoor subjects to include waterfowling, and land and seascapes. He continues to sharpen his photographic attack on fish and fishermen and to grow his file of stock photos.
The photo ops are certainly there. Mr. Levison runs an 18-foot Hewes flats boat out of Sag Harbor, Noyac, and Gardiner’s Bay in spring and most of the summer. He puts his more seaworthy 23-foot Parker in at Montauk for the false albacore-striped bass-bluefish season in the fall. His charter service can be found at allmontaukflyfishing.com.
“I do sight fishing [that’s when you cast to a specific fish in shallow water] in the spring in the Peconic, around Noyac with the flats boat. Sometimes I’ll go to Plum Gut in June and July, and then Montauk come September.” He likes what he’s doing and where he’s doing it. “We all live in paradise,” Mr. Levison said.