At Home With Jonathan Morse

Photographer Jonathan Morse doesn’t have to walk far to get to his exhibition, “Face to Face: East End Portraits,” which is on display from June 16 to July 12 at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum. He lives right down the street, in an eight-room, Federal-style home that has not changed much since it was built in 1856.

“My house and the Whaling Museum were both built by Benjamin Huntting, prominent landowner and whale ship owner. He was married to Mary Howell, whose family put the first tryworks on whaling ships,” Mr. Morse said. “Huntting lived in the Whaling Museum, and mine was built for his daughter Eloise, who was married to Henry Cook, an English doctor.”

For the last 30 years, Mr. Morse has made the house his home. “I’m only the fourth owner of the house,” he said.

Conspicuous consumption is on view everywhere. “There’s a fireplace in every room,” Mr. Morse noted. Elaborate rosettes on the ceilings remain from the days of gaslight chandeliers. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the parlor are edged in half panes.

“I think they were a tax dodge,” Mr. Morse said of the windows. “I heard they were taxed per pane. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I hope it is.”

His own father, Earl Morse, was a noted collector of East Asian antiquities. Mr. Morse’s home is filled with some of his father’s collectibles as well as other members of his family. “These Tong figurines are original,” he said. “These are the real thing.”

A painting from the Ming dynasty, “Writing a Poem Upon a Lotus Leaf,” once hung at the Met but now dominates Mr. Morse’s living room. A smaller but no less impressive Sonia Delaunay painting from 1959 hangs on another wall, inherited from his mother, Irene Levitt Morse. His grandfather Adolph Levitt’s collection of tiny Victorian cottages are neatly displayed on shelves. “They were used to burn incense,” he said.

Mr. Levitt was a baker, who you can thank for inventing the donut machine. “The Lincoln machine, named after the great emancipator,” Mr. Morse said. Sadly, there is not one on display.

A curio cabinet is filled with “all kinds of funny stuff,” like scrimshaw and a whale’s tooth. A 1950 Deardorff 8-by-10 camera is a hint to what’s in store on the tour. “It’s what Ansel Adams used,” he said. “The type of camera used for portraits in the ’30s and ’40s. It had that soft glow.”

Growing up in Great Neck, Mr. Morse’s parents surrounded him with art and encouraged him to study art, not just as folly but as a “serious expression of civilization.” As a young boy, he raised keeshonds, thoroughbred dogs, with his brother, and practiced the clarinet, although he says he is the “world’s worst” on the instrument.

Mr. Morse attended Choate and Harvard and became an architect, at one point working out of an office at the top of the Chrysler Building.

“In my younger days, I wasted a lot of time on sailboats,” he said. He first came to Sag Harbor on the weekends on his 53-foot yacht, which he raced. “It was sort of like having an apartment in the village,” he said. “When I embarked upon my nuptial experience, I thought I needed a hair dryer to plug in.”

Although the yacht is gone, you might catch him tooling around on his modified Triumph Street Triple R motorcycle.

Entering his office is nothing short of astounding: Rows and rows of vintage cameras line every wall. “Two hundred, but who’s counting?” he said. “I’ve got all kinds of great cameras. Here are all the Leicas M3, M4, M5 and M6, which you have probably never seen.” A few mementos are interspersed, like the top of a Roman amphora he found at the bottom of the sea while scuba diving in Bari, Italy.

All the magic happens in the adjoining room. His studio is simple. A large, old Swedish studio stand, a stool, a black, gray and white backdrop, and a single strobe light replicates traditional north window light.

Mr. Morse shot an earlier portrait series, “In His Own Light,” on location at the artists’ studios. “The location aspect was a bit of distraction for the character of the sitter,” Mr. Morse said. “The background is supposed to tell something about sitter but I don’t think it did.”

Then he shot a portrait of Paul Ickovic, another photographer, in his studio, and the photograph won a Guild Hall award. “Paul suggested I take nothing but portraits, because he liked his so well,” Mr. Morse said. “Paul in the studio emphasized character of sitter, which he has.”

“Every picture I took after that, the emphasis is on sitting, not on technique, not on the photographer,” he said. He used the exact same format to photograph 75 artists, all male, all of a certain age, all black and white, taken with his Sony mirrorless camera, model A7r Mark ll, 42 megapixels.

Shooting with a high-resolution camera is like looking at a person with a magnifying glass. “It’s kind of super realism,” Mr. Morse said. “These pictures of the guys derive their power in a certain sense from detail that you see. You don’t see those details in person.”

He’s talking about the details of an aging face, which may be why his sitters are all male. The photographs intensify the look of the person’s age and character and women, in Mr. Morse’s experience, were not too keen with the end result—but don’t ask him about it: “I’m sick of having to defend my grumpy old white guy pictures.”

Eric Fischl, John Alexander and Keith Sonnier are just a smattering of the local artists he shot for the “Face to Face” series. Forty portraits will be on exhibit at the museum. Peter J. Marcelle, who curated the show, is on the cover of the catalog, which contain 64 portraits and can be purchased for $20.

“I’m still shooting,” he said, bringing up his last sitter on his computer screen, artist Will Ryan. “He looks menacing. He didn’t like it.”

The finished works of art were printed by Jonathan, at his home. “The reason it looks like a print shop, is because it is a print shop.” The printer is the size of a grand piano.

There’s no glare and no frame, just a thin plastic sheet on the back, and vinyl laminate on the front. “I invented this,” he said, pointing to a propped up photo of Craig Page, who happened to pop in a few minutes later. The photo dwarfed the person.

He also invented a way to sign his artwork, including his catalog. See for yourself: He’ll be signing it at Sylvester & Co.,103 Main Street Sag Harbor on Sunday, May 28, from 5 to 7 p.m., and he may have a few of his friends on hand. They’ll meet again at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum on July 1, from 6 to 8 p.m.