ART
A Visual Builder Hal Prize photography judge Lars Topelmann by Myles Dannhausen Jr
Photo by Karsten Topelmann.
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ou’ve probably seen Lars Topelmann’s photography. You might even have stopped to ponder his images for a while as you flipped through the pages of a magazine in the waiting room at your dentist’s office, or took a second glance at a billboard. But you probably didn’t know his name, and you almost certainly didn’t know the photographs were his. For nearly 30 years, Topelmann carved out a niche as a photographer on ad campaigns for brands including Nike, Audi, Converse and Dr. Martens, and was known for his distinctive style of black-and-white photography. “I homed in on that because you need to have a focus. You can’t be everything because you won’t stand out,” Topelmann said as we flipped through portfolios in the Ephraim home that he and his wife, Monique McClean, remodeled when they moved back to his hometown in 2018. “Having that narrow-ish view – a little goofy, a little fun – pigeonholed me in a good way.” His work, even when painstakingly planned and staged, feels authentic, spontaneous and random. 72
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“My goal is to make it look natural and comfortable, even in a setup,” Topelmann said. “You can get that photo at the actual moment it’s happening – then you need one photographer. But you have one chance to get it. That’s why you need all those people on a shoot: the designer, the lighting guys, the wardrobe folks. They’re re-creating that. You’re basically making up reality, but you’re trying to use all the cues from what reality is.” When he was growing up in Ephraim in the 1970s, he didn’t want to be a painter in the shadow of his parents, the late Karsten Topelmann and the late Ellen Sprogø-Topelmann. “My parents had that painting thing going on,” he said. “I was too impatient for it, and they were kind of rock stars in the art world.” His dad turned him on to another creative pursuit at an early age, taking him on photography adventures around the peninsula, playing with video and still photography. At Gibraltar High School, Topelmann joined the Ink and Shutter Club, and after graduating in 1981, he studied further at Milwaukee Area Technical College, then at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
“It was cool to do something that was artistic, but not painting,” he said. “It’s all in the same territory – a lot of the same principles.” But breaking into the business in the mid-1980s was hard. “I thought I was going to be this hotshot photographer, but I didn’t have a direction,” Topelmann said. He went to Chicago and found work as a photographer’s assistant, working on fashion, food and commercial shoots, lugging equipment, setting up lighting and learning what he loved – and what he didn’t. But he was falling into the trap of being known as a great assistant, not a great photographer. He moved to Portland, Oregon, to reestablish his identity. There, a friend got him hooked up with a low-paying, but high-profile opportunity shooting a spread on outdoor activities for The Oregonian newspaper. “It was right up my alley,” Topelmann said. “Windsurfing, snowboarding, kayaking, fishing, showing all Oregon has to offer. And I needed to establish myself as an outdoor, fun photographer.”
