Photography and Text by Tony Ward, Copyright 2020
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Ike’s Study
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I visited Ike Hay at his home on many occasions. He was a great teacher of art and design at Millersville University where we first met when I was an undergraduate student from 1974 to 1977. I took several classes with him as he was a great teacher of art and design. Ike’s first love was sculpture, but he had other interests as well. Ike was a collector of Empire furniture and a significant amount of his scholarship was defined by his love for French culture, especially French antiquities and an emphasis on the history of Napoleon Bonaparte, the great French military leader and emperor of France. Ike’s study was a place where we often chatted about art and also life. He became a lifelong friend and confidant until his untimely passing in 2014 at the age of 69. When I began the project of a book of Tableaux Vivants, I selected Ike’s study as one of the nostalgic places I wanted to photograph because of my longstanding friendship with Ike and his family. So one summer day in 1994, I packed up my gear with models in tow and traveled from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he lived with his wife Teri and his daughters Miraya and Mistral. On this particular occasion I decided to shoot in black and white and in color, an unusual departure for me at the time.
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To see selected works from the book of Tableaux Vivants, click here: https://tonyward.com/early-work/tableaux-vivants-1993-2000/