Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based, American photographer, has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career.  Her work is intimately tied to the history of the photographic medium through her innovative use of natural light, still life, and large-format cameras and film. Stern’s works in the Obscura Gallery exhibition, Echoes of Light, are luminous examples of her innovation. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, she veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. As a result, in both the Quickening and Force Field series, Stern highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of a shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light, her images resemble charcoal drawings.  Indeed, a viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper.

Influenced by abstract expressionist painting but working as a lens-based photographer, Stern defies the expectations central to photography by pulling away from the sharp focus, instead blurring, veiling, cropping, partially obscuring, and otherwise de-literalizing what is in front of her lens.

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“My photographs are not about what they are of…. I believe that photography is a medium of light, not representation. Light is to photography as paint is to painting. I think like a painter in that my concerns are largely formal: my aim is to create tension, plasticity, texture, and, especially, spatial ambiguity in which figure (or abstract form) and ground seem to merge with or emerge from one another. Above all, I want the image to feel alive and filled with energy.” – LS

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