Steve Stolee takes viewers of his new photo exhibit on a stroll through city streets.

In “Pavements and Windows,” on display this month at the Winslow Way Cafe, Stolee hones in on urban storefront windows and pavement surfaces.

“I’ve always been a dawdler and I’ve always enjoyed looking at things in ways that weren’t intended,” Stolee said. “A window reflection can be so many things.”

A man serves food in a diner, his face overlaid by the reflected street scene. Stores display mannequins, sculptures, posters and figurines in windows dressed with 20th century memorabilia.

A closeup of pavement shows a scarred surface that becomes a formal composition in line, form and texture – asphalt that is a physical record of street history.

“These planes serve as a canvas,” Stolee said, “on which we can observe a kind of unintentional automatic writing effected by the uses and abuses visited on them by human activities, the specific nature of which is only hinted at.”

The 25, 20-by-24 -inch prints Stolee calls “urban mini-landscapes” are complex images approached with deliberate simplicity.

Stolee scans 35-millimeter film and makes archival-pigment inket prints. The digital fields are not altered by Stolee, except to adjust contrast and color balance.

“They are not double-exposures,” Stolee said. “Anybody standing with me would have seen what I saw. I want them to be reminders of places that actually exist, not figments of my imagination, however artistic it may be.”

The photographer began learning his craft at the University of North Dakota student newspaper, trained informally by a fellow staff member.

Several years later, in Alaska, Stolee collected images on slide film, and began to give slide shows.

At the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, he took photojournalism classes.

“I worked as a Teamster on the trans-Alaska pipeline project,” Stolee said, “and spent most of my spare time in the construction camp documenting the people and process of the construction and life in camp.”

Next he worked for the Fairbanks Arts Council, photographing all the arts programming, from live performance to painting exhibits.

After moving to Bainbridge in 1979, Stolee enrolled at the

University of Washington in design and photography in 1982. He studied study color printing with Paul Berger and Ron Carrahe, graduating in 1986 with a BFA in graphic design and photography.

At first, Stolee made money with design, reserving photography for “personal art therapy.”

But through the 1990s, he edged closer to a professional commitment to the photographic medium, exhibiting work in a juried show at Bainbridge Performing Arts in 1997 and bringing work to the annual PhotoAmericas Portfolio Review in Portland, Ore., for critique.

The evaluation from gallery representatives and museum curators helped point him toward developing his imagery, and paved the way for a solo exhibit at Pioneer Square’s Zeitgeist gallery in 2001.

Stolee owns a Nikon 35mm, a Nikon digital and a Pentax 645, and is especially fond of his pocket Olympus.

But the tool is subordinate to the sensibility, he believes.

“I had someone I respect say, ‘These window things are not new – look at Lee Freidlander,’” he said. “I thought, ‘You could sure box yourself in by deciding you won’t do anything your idols do.’

“There’s always a new slant.”