By Allan Appel
Local philanthropist and nonprofit leadership training pioneer William Graustein grew up as a shy young man in a family where people didn’t speak much to each other.
Then when he was 20, and a budding geology major in college, he went on a summer archeological dig among the 10,000 year-old ruins of the indigenous nomadic hunters who passed through at what is now Hell Gap, Wyoming. Though silent, the fields of flints and fluted rock walls spoke deeply to him.
Roll the clock a mere 60 years forward and both those themes — how the past speaks and how people in the present must learn to communicate with each other far better in order for us to survive and to prosper — have come together in a first-time exhibition of Graustein’s lifetime of taking moving, silently evocative photographs.
Saturday afternoon the visual memoir, Traces: Witness and Trespass, a program of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, marked its last showing at the gallery at ConnCAT at 4 Science Park on Winchester Avenue, where ConnCORP CEO Erik Clemons interviewed Graustein before an attentive crowd of 40 admirers.
Click here for a digital tour of Graustein’s album of photos along with revelatory accompanying texts by the photographer and by curator Magalis Videaux.
They document what were for Graustein moments of spiritual encounter during backpacking trips through such locations as the Grand Canyon, the Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico and Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona .
The work is animated both by personal memories of a life-changing pre-philanthropic career in geology, experiencing some of these locations with his late wife Jean; and by a growing sense the presence of the Anasazi and other ancient people among the evocative archeological remains.
Graustein’s texts and photos reverberate with the tension of encounters that in his phrase are both solitary and shared. He comes quite close to agonizing where witnessing becomes trespass, another of his formulations.
One emotional, candid interchange took place during the formal discussion with Erik Clemons, who has become a close personal friend. Clemons said that in his own early days of community work, while he felt like a collaborator and friend, many Dixwell residents viewed him otherwise, as a foreigner, an infiltrator and intruder.
Graustein responded, in part, by recalling one photograph he took at the Wheatley Plantation, an aerial view of feet at the bottom of the photographic frame, his own feet, on a prison, stone-like surface below.
“I realized those are white feet in a place that held black feet,” Graustein said. So he added a meditative reflection to the photograph to put it in context and “to move the conversation forward.”
That approach, turning a personal thread into what Graustein calls a community fabric, seems to be the heart of the ethic of his practice both in these photographs as well as in his flagship philanthropic underwriting of the Community Leadership Program. For 33 years that program has brought grassroots New Havners, including many current and future nonprofit leaders, together to deepen relationships, one encounter at a time.
Which caused this reporter to ask the photographer: As deepening human relationships are so central to his contributions, why are we humans in effect almost entirely absent from his photographs?
“There are no people to get scared of,” he quipped. Then he added, “Without people, you can open the imagination.”
During the public portion of the Q & A following Clemons’ interview, a questioner brought the topic up to date. Graustein had discussed how leaders of the ancient Pueblo people used kivas, or subterranean rooms, for social and ceremonial gatherings. The question:
“How do you see the future of New Haven because we’re in a time when we too feel it may be time to go underground? Do you have plans for such safe spaces?”
“I’m fine with people going ‘underground’,” he replied, “for spiritual experience.
“I’m not fine,” he said to applause, “with people staying above ground without courage.”
The exhibition will move to the Yale School of Management in the fall and then to Gateway Community College in the spring of 2026.
