Lynn Geesaman: Images

Description

Lynn Geesaman spent two decades creating some of the most timeless and beautiful images ever made of the natural world as it brushes against and mingles with human creations. 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, resulting in rich fields of black that call to mind the opulent darkness of drypoint, a method invented for tonal printmaking. Geesaman studied physics and mathematics, which schooled her to instinctively organize pictorial space through geometric principles. In her haunting 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