Echoes of Light, a solo exhibition of the work of Lynn Stern, the convention-defying, New York-based American photographer, is open at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe, NM until August 9th, 2025.
Stern has pushed the boundaries of photography during her 47-year career. Influenced by abstract expressionist painting but working as a lens-based photographer, she defies the expectations central to photography by pulling away from realistic depiction, instead blurring, veiling, cropping, partially obscuring, and otherwise de-literalizing what is in front of her lens. Her works presented in Echoes of Light are luminous examples of her innovation.
“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,” says Stern.
The exhibition include works from Stern’s Quickening, Passage, Force Field, and Mystic Light series. Using natural light and a scrim between the camera and her still life subjects, Stern veils her subject matter to create a translucence that fills her images with soft light. In both the Quickening and Force Field series, she highlights only the edges of her objects with a stroke of shadow on a white background. With this innovative use of light her images resemble charcoal drawings. A viewer who doesn’t understand that a camera made these images might assume Stern creates her work with pencil and paper.
Stern’s Mystic Light series was inspired by a subtle pencil drawing by Tomoharu Murakami depicting the outline of a tall rectangular form on a slight base in which the dark edges of the rectangle gradually fade to the off-white of the paper base. Using a scrim of translucent white fabric, she creates a subtle but intense shimmer of light that makes the forms seem to vibrate internally; the resulting image feels spiritual in nature.
“The first question asked of a photographer is always “what do you photograph?” I am not interested in subject matter in the sense of people, places and things. I want my images to evoke feeling more from what is sensed than what is seen; and I want to do that by means of light,” says Stern.
The exhibition also includes works from two earlier series, Dialogues in Light and Unveilings made in 1985. Dialogues in Light marks Stern’s first experiments with the white scrim, using different types of natural light and various types of flowers. In Unveilings, she sought to create a dialogue between figure and ground, manipulating the scrim to create what she calls a ”charged” composition in light and shadow. The varying stances of the anemone – the curvature of the stem, the turned backs, profiles or fully open petals, their translucency or lack thereof — become metaphors for vulnerability.
Lynn Stern : Echoes of Light
From June 27 to August 9, 2025
Obscura Gallery
225 Delgado St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501
www.obscuragallery.net
