Stephen Cysewski captured Tacoma’s 1970s soul. In death, his photos will live on
Stephen Cysewski had no use for sunsets.
“It’s the everyday and mundane things that make memories,” the photographer told University of Washington News — not long after Tacoma discovered his work.
Back in 1979, Cysewski , who grew up in the area, visited Tacoma in anonymity, capturing hundreds of images depicting a decaying downtown. Old neon signs, sagging adult bookstores and fallen-on-hard-times historic buildings, like Union Station, all became the subject of his lens.
Utilizing a style of photography he appropriately described as “wandering,” Cysewski documented a working-class town down on its luck, largely in stark black and white.
Then, for years, Cysewski’s images — boxes of them — remained almost entirely unseen.
Cysewski passed away on Monday, July 20 at the age of 74. According to his family, Cysewski died at home in Alaska after a short battle with pancreatic cancer.
His lasting relationship with Tacoma began in the mid-2000s, with the unearthing and digitization of his collection.
True to his later words, there were no sunsets to be seen.
It was simply Tacoma, gritty, unvarnished and captivating.
The local blog Exit 133 first posted a short write-up highlighting Cysewski’s photos in early 2007, the blog’s creator Derek Young recalled.
For many, the newly discovered collection crystallized a moment in time that was slowly disappearing around them.
“I think part of it is, the pace of change seems really slow here at times, but at the same time I look at those photos and I’m reminded of how far along things have come, and how much things have changed, for good and for bad,” Young said recently. “(Cysewski) didn’t go out looking for something inspiring to see. He went out and captured what you saw.”
A hallmark of Cysewski’s work, which included similar wanderings around Seattle, Fairbanks and Anchorage, there were no touch-ups or attempts to find positive light. In 1979, Tacoma’s downtown appeared beaten, run down but resiliently proud.
Tellingly, unlike Cysewski’s Seattle project, very few people are seen in his 1979 Tacoma collection, adding to the eerie sense of place and, for some, a washed-out Neko Case-like nostalgia.
“It’s our family portrait for our city at a certain point in time, whether we like it or not,” Young said, noting that Cysewski’s 1979 photos emerged just as many relative newcomers to the city were debating issues like downtown development, condos and the prospect of gentrification.
“It hit at a good time,” added Young, who moved to Tacoma in the 1990s. “People were thinking about place, thinking about what we were becoming, and this was a fairly amazing snapshot looking back, particularly because a lot of the places are still there, or were still there.”
According to Elizabeth Hancock and Margaret Rudolf, Cysewski’s daughters, their father’s objective in photography was always finding the soul of his subjects, even when capturing a city like Tacoma in 1979.
“A lot of the places that he really enjoyed, it had to do with realness,” Rudolf said this week. “I think he saw that in Tacoma, which he connected to.”
In the years that followed Cysewski’s photos first appearing online, a friendship blossomed between Tacoma and the photographer. As it turned out, Cysewski had returned to the city several more times, updating his collection and adding to the growing time capsule. He would continue this work until his death, while seeing his old photos published in outlets like City Arts Magazine.
Tacoma was hungry for all of it.
Justin Wadland, who is now the interim director of UWT’s library, was one of the people responsible for one of Cysewski returns to Tacoma, in 2008.
Wadland recalls nervously asking Cysewski to come to town for a project that would revisit his previous work, contrasting it with what was then the present.
The collaboration resulted in “Tacoma Then and Again,” which paired 125 of Cysewski’s original 1979 images with new ones.
“It just sort of captured my imagination, thinking about the change that was visible in those photographs,” Wadland said.
Today, a large collection of Cysewski’s work is available for all to see at the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room. According to NW Room Librarian Spencer Bowman, prior to his death Cysewski was working with the NW Room to further add to the collection.
Bowman expects the donation, which is still planned, to “expand our ability to see Tacoma in a different light.”
According to his daughters, Cysewski grew to love Tacoma and the reception his work received here, happy to see his photos cherished and appreciated for what they were — moments captured in time, as they were then.
“The Tacoma project was the one he was most proud of. It’s what he talked about the most,” Hancock said.
“His love of Tacoma showed,” Rudolf added. “It wasn’t some passing thing for him.”
This story was originally published July 25, 2020 at 7:00 AM.
