Name Lynn Stern Role Photographer | ||
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Excerpt Two from Perceptual | Conceptual: How Do We Experience Art?
Lynn Stern (born 1942) is a North American photographer based in New York City. She who creates black-and-white photographs made with natural light. She began to consider photography as a career in the late 1970s.
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Life and work
The collection of abstract expressionist painting and sculpture assembled by her father, David Solinger, influenced Lynn Stern’s aesthetic sensibility. She graduated with honors from Smith College, where she majored in English and minored in music. Hoping to become a film editor, she apprenticed briefly at Ross-Gaffney Films, then married architect Robert A.M. Stern and worked as his photographic archivist. She became interested in photographic composition while assisting his in-house photographer, Edmund Stoecklein.
In 1977, Stern studied at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, but soon found herself at odds with a curriculum that was oriented toward photojournalism. She left to study privately with Joseph Saltzer, then printed with Paul Caponigro in 1981-’82. Early influences included Caponigro, Edward Weston and the 19th-century American Luminist painters. Later influences include the writings and black paintings of Ad Reinhardt, and the work of Francis Bacon.
The central concern in Stern’s work is luminosity. In 1985 she began using a naturally backlit translucent white fabric to convey the essence of light. Unveilings (1985) features flowers juxtaposed with the folds of a glowing white fabric. Whiteness (1987) focuses solely on the purity of light. Dispossession (1990-’92) is a series of 12 composite works in which human skulls are set against a luminous white fabric, in counterpoint with Stern’s face portrayed as a death mask beneath them. The theme of Dispossession is not actual death, but the mind’s preoccupation with it – the human struggle to cope with mortality. The Animus (1995-‘97) series, featuring animal skulls, evolved from Dispossession. Creating split-toned negative prints, Stern transformed the luminous white fabric into a rich dark color, causing the animal skulls behind it to come alive in white. In Veiled Still Lifes (1994-2003), Stern photographed vases behind a translucent black fabric, creating a dark, textured luminosity. In all of her series, the space between objects becomes as important as the objects themselves. Later series – (W)Holes, (1994-2006), Ghost Circles (2004-’07) and Full Circle (2001-’09) – furthered her work with skulls and moved increasingly toward abstraction. Five books of Stern’s work have been published: Unveilings (1988), Dispossession (1995), Animus (2000), Veiled Still Lifes (2006) and Frozen Mystery (2010), which accompanied her retrospective exhibition at the Museo Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón in Spain.