Nancy Teressa Nolan

About 10 minutes before she is supposed to be photographed, Nancy Nolan rushes into her office, curly hair piled high on her head and holding a bag.

"Help me decide," she says as she pulls clothes out of the bag and dumps a fistful of jewelry on her desk.

Nolan, a professional photographer, clearly waited till the last moment to decide what to wear. And she also is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being the one who is going to sit in front of a camera.

"Worst nightmare right here," she says as she pulls on a black skirt over her leggings.

During the photo shoot, she tries to hide behind her mane. She puts her hands in front of her face. She looks like she could dart at any moment.

"Getting pictures taken is traumatic."

Nolan should know. As a professional photographer, she has shot fashion models, actors, politicians and socialites. Her photos of room interiors have appeared in national magazines like Southern Living, Country French, Traditional Home, Decor and Luxe.

Nolan says she was a shy, introverted child whom nobody noticed until a family friend handed her a camera. She was 14. The camera was a Canon with a fixed lens.

"I took that camera that very same day, and I started playing with it and looking through it, and honestly for the first time in my life, people were looking at me and seeing me. I was very invisible and quiet," she says. "You can be very invisible, especially as a child.

"People started to look at me and notice me, and I was able to hide behind it at the same time. Bam. Two great things. And I fell in love with it. And then I fell in love with the weight of it, the gears, the clicking noise, the sound of the shutter."

While most of her work is just that -- work -- Nolan is in the middle of her first exhibition of photos involving her personal life. "Park's Pants" opened Saturday at Wildwood Park for the Arts. Park is her firstborn son. The pants are a pair of Levi's 501 jeans owned by Park's dad that Nolan photographed him in from birth to age 19.

J.C. PENNEY AND CALVIN KLEIN

Nolan was named after her mother, Nancy Teressa Nolan, a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Sicily. Her father, Bruce Francis Nolan, an Irishman, was a naval officer, and his job meant the family of six moved a lot.

Nolan worked at a naval exchange as a cashier and saved up enough money to buy a better camera, a Canon AE-1, which she thinks cost about $200 in 1977 (maybe $700 today). She taught herself how to take photographs and develop film. Her mother let her set up a darkroom in a small space in the family's attic. The space was so tight, Nolan could not stand up. She had to carry water up and down the attic steps to develop the film.

"There were quite a few big mistakes and really ridiculous stuff that happened up there, but I learned," she says.

After graduating from high school, Nolan worked at a law office and saved up money to attend the Art Institute of Atlanta. While in school, she interviewed for an apprenticeship with Ford Smith, then a well-known fashion photographer.

"He said, 'So you want to work here. Show me your stuff.' I didn't bring a portfolio. I didn't bring anything. I sat there feeling the blood draining from my head and thinking, 'I am an idiot.' I didn't bring anything. I just came to meet him like the most ridiculous person in the world."

Nolan says she was quick enough to offer to work for free for one week. Smith took her up on it.

Nolan worked for Smith for about four years, starting as his assistant and then as a full-blown fashion photographer. Her first client was J.C. Penney. She ended up going out on her own and was a fashion photographer for 15 years. Her life revolved around taking pictures of beautiful people.

"I was always well-rounded, and I was never what one would classify as a beauty, and it never bothered me in this situation. It never bothered me. Maybe because I was in it, and I came up in it, and I really, really knew these people," she says of the models. "You are with them hours and days sometimes, depending on what you are shooting, and you live with them, and you see every aspect of them, and they are gorgeous and flawed and mean and ugly and nasty and fantastic. They are just like everybody else. They really are."

When she turned 30, her photo assistants hired a male stripper to surprise her at a photo shoot.

"This poor man comes in, and he is doing his thing, and there are guys 10 times better looking there," she says. "It was the most interesting and uncomfortable moment in my life."

Eventually, the work started getting to her. "There were a lot of rough years where heroine chic was in, and everybody was very thin and drawn." And she started worrying about her images' impact on young girls.

Then, clothing designer Calvin Klein's "basement campaign" was released in 1995 depicting what appeared to be scantily clad, underage models. Critics called the campaign "child pornography."

Nolan was done with fashion photography.

PARK'S PANTS

Nolan and her husband spent about a year and a half in Birmingham, Ala., before moving to Little Rock in 1998.

"I feel like an honorary Southerner," she says.

Nolan was 35 when she gave birth prematurely to Park. She had preeclampsia and had a cesarean section during her 29th week of pregnancy. Park was only 2 pounds at birth and remained in the hospital for several weeks. Nolan wasn't allowed to hold him.

Then a stay-at-home mom, Nolan decided she needed a "gift" to give to her child. She tried to write in a journal but decided she wasn't any good. Then she remembered seeing a photo essay where a father photographed his daughter each year in a swimsuit.

So she took a favorite pair of jeans owned by her husband, Stephen Lanford, and put Park in them. At that time, Lanford also was a photographer. The couple met when Nolan hired him as her assistant. When the couple divorced in 2004, Nolan kept the jeans.

"I now look at the jeans as genes with a 'G' and the fact that I was asking this young man to put on a pair of pants of his father's every year and you know, men and their boys, that relationship can be very cantankerous. ... Every male child has to metaphorically put on their father's pants at some point and own them or let it go or throw it out. They are genetically attached for life," she says.

In the photos, she let Park be Park. She says she "never tried to control his moods." In one photo, Park is crying.

"It is kind of looking at a stranger, but a stranger with my face," Park says. "It's humbling and awe inspiring."

"Honestly, it is surreal. It is hard to believe, in a way. I am exceptionally proud of my mom. The dedication that something like this takes is unbelievable," Park says about his mom. "She is amazing, absolutely amazing. She is the most caring and one of the hardest-working people I know."

Nolan enlarged the "Park's Pants" photos to 20 feet tall by 10 feet wide.

"I am pleased and fascinated," Nolan says of the photos of her son. "I never thought too far in the future. I certainly did not understand the scope of the project when I started it or the layers to the project."

At the suggestion of her friend and mentor, Melissa Thoma, the exhibit is on show at Wildwood. Thoma, a principal in the marketing firm Thoma Thoma, has been coaching Nolan on public speaking.

"It is impossible not to just love her. She's got that warm heart and that big smile," Thoma says. "She is so super cool. She is so smart and so with it."

Park is not her only child. At age 40, Nolan had her "surprise baby," Henry, now 14. She calls him "the cutest kid" and says he has "amazing eyes and looks like an anime character."

FIRST LADIES AND

LOCAL CELEBS

In Nolan's studio above the Green Corner Store on Little Rock's South Main Street, the walls are lined with oversize black-and-white photographs of some of her favorite subjects. There's the late philanthropist Jennings Osborne wrapped in Christmas lights. Nearby, Clinton School of Public Service Dean Skip Rutherford sits on an elephant. Basketball great Corliss Williamson poses wearing diamond earrings with his hands in front of his mouth. Home designer Laura Day wears a very short dress while standing on a glass coffee table.

While it is not on the wall, one of her favorites is a poignant photo of then Gov. Mike and Ginger Beebe walking out of the Governor's Mansion, the first lady's arm around her husband.

"Whether photographing a room, food, landscape or a person, Nancy has a vision for what she wants her pictures to say to her audience," Ginger Beebe says. "When photographing people, her pictures let you see the heart and soul of the person. I was always so nervous having pictures made, but Nancy had a way of helping me to relax and have fun."

Nolan also took a photo of interior designer Shayla Copas that ran on the cover of Inviting Arkansas. In it, she is shown from above, her red gown puddled around her.

"She's a magician," Copas says. "There is something about her eye. She knows exactly what she wants and how to style it. ... She is so salt of the earth and so real."

Copas' husband, Scott, liked the photograph so much he enlarged it to 3 by 6 feet. It hangs in his home office.

"I look at it every night," Scott Copas says. "Nancy is unbelievable. She is one of the most creative photographers I have ever seen."

While she claims she is not a writer, here is what Nolan wrote for the Wildwood exhibit about the "Park's Pants" project:

"I wanted to record and explore this life that Park fought so hard for. And, we did it together. This unsuspecting child who gave so much of himself to the project rarely complained about putting those jeans on year after year for his mother.

"He is 19 now. The jeans, once enveloping him like the sea, are now snug. It's the natural ending, but also just the beginning."

NAN Profiles on 10/11/2015