The series by Lynn Saville was selected by James Estrin, Co-Editor, NY Times Lens Blog, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Photographer, Curator and Collector, ARTmostfierce, during portfolios reviews organized by The New York Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP NY) on February 18th, 2015, in New York.
Lynn Saville is a New York-based photographer specializing in night urban landscapes. Her work, which has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, Gallery Kayafas in Boston and Martha Schneider in Chicago. Two monographs of her work have been published: Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli, 1997) and Night/Shift (Monacelli/Random House, 2009). Her third monograph, Dark City, with a forward by Geoff Dyer will be published by Damiani (Bologna) in September, 2015.
The Dark City photographs are a further exploration of Saville’s work on the urban landscape at dusk and dawn. In this series, she focuses on the evolution of empty spaces in and around New York and other American cities. Such transitional spaces—including parking lots, ecosystems like the Meadowlands, and vacant stores—reveal a disquieting beauty. They also reflect a natural cycle of decay and rebirth in urban ecology, as objects such as ladders and brooms signal that the work of renewal is under way. She photographs primarily at dawn and twilight, when the balance of light from natural and artificial sources is also shifting. Dark City is ultimately a dynamic and ongoing dialogue between defined place and empty space.
