Lynn Geesaman

June 26th – September 9th 2018 

This retrospective exhibition was organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art. The show included over 120 images, beginning with Geesaman’s 1979-80 Twins Series and continuing through the Quarry Series, Mendota Bridge, Wax Figures set in the formal rooms of Warwick Castle, and Dioramas of zoo animals. In 1984, Lynn Geesaman made her first foray into structured nature: the botanical Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia. 

Geesaman studied physics and mathematics, which schooled her to instinctively organize pictorial space through geometric principles, especially the Cartesian Coordinate System. Formal gardens of the Western tradition became her ostensible subject matter, but she ultimately zeroed in on the margin between artifice and nature. Not interested in documenting reality, she mastered a diffusion technique to suppress detail in her black and white photographs. Her goal was to make photographs that stepped further and further away from the literal. The rich fields of black she created using this technique call to mind the opulent darkness of drypoint, or mezzotint, a method invented for tonal printmaking. 

In her black-and-white photographs, Geesaman strove for three-dimensionality through chiaroscuro, pictorial representation that focused on light and shade. It was Geesaman’s response to the Bernheim Arboretum in 1992 that led her into color. She found that particular landscape unsuitable to her black-and-white aesthetic. Challenged, she took up color film and taught herself chromogenic printing—pushing the boundaries of this process. As her color work progressed, it became more and more abstract; her colors were more surreal, more imagined, and closer to painting than traditional color photography. In 2007 she took her last black-and-white photographs, and in 2009 her last color ones.

The Museum published a book in conjunction with the exhibition: 105 photographs, designed by Eleanor Caponrigo, and printed by Trifolio  in Verona, Italy.

Installation Images