Education Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2009 Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York Night/Shift July - September 2009 Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Night/Shift June – July 2008 Montgomery Museum of Art, Alabama Night/Shift April – August 2008 Stephen A. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas Sept-Dec 08 2008 Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC Night/Shift Sept-Dec. 2007 Hiram College, Night/Shift November - December 2007 Pensacola Art Museum Pensacola Florida, Night/Shift July – October Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC Feb-July New Color Photographs Baudoin Lebon Gallery, Paris, France “Night/Shift” 2006 Arts for Transit, MTA of New York City - 7 Large Light boxes “42nd Street Nocturne” at 42nd St. & 6th Ave. near Times Square 2006 Duke University, President’s Gallery, “Lynn Saville: The Color of Night” 2005 Duke University, “Night Vision: Photographs of William Gedney & Lynn Saville” 2004 The Photographers’ Gallery, London “Night Cityscapes” 2003 Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York “Night’s Edge” 2002 Brooklyn Public Library, New York 2001 Hiram College, Frohring Art Center, Hiram, Ohio 2000 Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris 1999 The Photographers’ Gallery, London 1998 Gente di Fotografia, Palermo, Italy 1997 Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York Jackson Fine Art Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia John Cleary Gallery, Houston, Texas Selected Group Exhibitions: 2009 Safe-T-Gallery, Brooklyn, NY “Night Moves” March – April 2009 2008 Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, “The Photographer’s Eye” Mandeville Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, NY, “SNAP” Cazenovia College Art Gallery, Cazenovia, NY “The Specificities of Space” Boston Convention Center, MA “Darkness, Darkness” 2008 Harvard University, Three Columns Gallery, “Darkness, Darkness” 2007 Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, “Easy Rider” 2007 Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC “Exterior” 2006 Westport Arts Center, Westport, CN, “Brooklyn” 2006 Muse Gallery, Philadelphia, “Muse Exhibition” 2005 Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, “Photographing the Museum” 2005 Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, DC, “Night’s Edge” 2005 Central Park Conservancy Commission: “Picturing Central Park” 2004 AXA Gallery New York, “At the Crossroads of Desire - Times Square 2004 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Open House: Working in Brooklyn” 2004 Opelousas Museum of Art, Opelousas, LA, “New York Show” 2003 Yancey Richardson Gallery, “Enchanted Evenings” 2003 Moder Museum, Città Sant’Angelo, Italy “Night Encounters” 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts/Tanqueray No 10, Here, NYC 2003 Century Club, “Artists Choose Artists” 2001 Galerie Valérie Cueto, Paris, France, “Girls on Top” Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY, “Aesthetics ContempPhotography” “Mois de la Photo,” Paris, France 2000 Yancey Richardson Gallery, NY, “From Here to There: Highlights…” Hudson River Museum, “Three American Night Landscape Photographers” Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, France Deutsche Bank Zur Stockeregg Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland Archive: Duke University, Durham, N.C. Perkins Library of Special Collection Grants and Awards: 2006-7 NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship Program for Two Projects: A book, Brooklyn, Twilight and a traveling museum show: Night/Shift 2006 New Collector’s Program, San Diego Museum of Photography 2005 Women In Photography International, First Place, Architecture 2004 Parsons School of Design, Faculty Development Award 1999 Times Square Reinventing the Fantasy, collaboration with Robin Noble, funded by New York State Council for the Arts New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship Selected Collections: LACMA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Denver Art Museum Museum of Fine Arts, Houston George Eastman House Museum of the City of New York Brooklyn Museum of Art Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego Milwaukee Art Museum California Museum of Photography New York Public Library Oxford University, Bodleian Library Museum of the City of Paris Prudential Insurance Company Pfizer Credit Suisse Goldman Sachs Mint Museum of Art Selected Articles: Bomb Magazine, Single Image, Fall, 2008 Monthly Photography, Seoul Korea, Portfolio & Interview Spring 2008 The New York Times, Sunday Arts & Leisure, January 5, 2003 ARTnews,art review, May, 2003 Black and White Magazine, Spring, 2003 2wice Magazine, Spring 2003 New York Times, Sunday Arts & Leisure, July 1995 The Manhattan Review, covers since 1995 “Art in Review” Charles Hagen, New York Times, 1995 “Voice Choices” Vince Aletti, The Village Voice, 1995, l993 Harper’s, May 1995, April 1994 Books Night/Shift, May 2009, Monacelli/Random House Intro: Arthur C. Danto Open House, Working in Brooklyn, 2004, Brooklyn Museum of Art Acquainted with the Night, Rizzoli, 1997 The Language of Life, Bill Moyers, 1995 Horses in the Circus Ring, E.P. Dutton, 1989 Galleries Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina The Photographers’ Gallery, London Baudoin Lebon Gallery, Paris Miller Block Gallery, Boston Teaching Experience 2008, 2009 New York University, Spring Semester 2004-2008 Teaching Faculty, International Center of Photography Teaching Faculty, New York University Guest Lecturer: School of Visual Arts Guest Lecturer: Duke University Visiting Artist, Lecturer, New York University 2003 Visiting Artist, Panelist, Dowling College, Long Island Visiting Artist, Lecturer, New York University Visiting Artist, Lecturer, School of Visual Arts 2000-2005 Visiting Artist, Teacher, Parsons School of Design, MFA Program, Architecture & School of Visual Arts Education: Pratt Institute, M.F.A., Duke University, B.A., Master Class with Philippe Halsman, New York,
Duke University, B.A., 1971
Pratt Institute, M.F.A., 1976
Master Class with Philippe Halsman, 1979
Press
Photo Review Magazine, Portfolio Publication, Fall, 2005
The New York Times, Sunday Arts & Leisure, January 5, 2003
ARTNews, art review, May, 2003
Black and White Magazine, Portfolio and Cover Photograph, Spring, 2003
2twice Magazine, 1999
"Acquainted with the Night, Photographs by Lynn Saville, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. NY, 1997
The Language of Life by Bill Moyers, 1995
New York Times, Sunday Arts and Leisure, July, 1995
"Illuminating the Darkness," Duke Magazine, July 1995
"The Haunting Photographs of Lynn Saville," The World and I, January, 1995
"A Shot in the Dark," Insight Magazine, January, 1995
Harper’s, January, 1997, May 1995, April 1994
Photographie, a Swiss Art Magazine, Spring, 1989
Lighting Dimensions Magazine, Fall 1989, 1992
Night/Shift
The New York that I traveled to as a child was a black-and-white city. Those early trips were festivals of arrival and departure, with the family headed for the pier and a sea-journey that would inaugurate my parents’ sabbatical in Europe. It was as if the city I sped through was the marvelous black-and-white metropolis of early movies, glittering with icons like the Rockefeller Center towers and hinting of shadowed back streets and alleys. I resolved, even then, that I would return to this place I was passing through.
The city I did return to, as a graduate student of photography, was still a film-noir set. It came alive for me at twilight, when the crowds subsided and the streets and buildings seemed to dream their own dreams. In the snow, a skyscraper glittered like a white iceberg. As I looked down from the Empire State Building, the Flatiron became a triangle of blackness, the negative image of an icon. On the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise’s Standing Woman (Elevation) assumed her rightful place as a goddess in the skyline. I still felt the enchantment of my childhood, seeing in black and white.
Of course, I lived my life amid the daytime cacophony of color, the visual complement of the sirens and engines and chatter we all habituate. But, gradually, the more ambiguous, transitional zones of the city began to lure me. My twilight journeys took me to areas where the city was exposed in its unraveling—to building sites in Queens, the broken sidewalks and abandoned buildings under the Brooklyn Bridge. And I began to see these places in color—as if the visual noise of daytime were transforming itself into haunting evening tonalities.
It is often impossible to pinpoint influences. But perhaps the breakthrough color photographs of Stephen Shore, which I had first seen as a graduate student, were having a delayed effect. I was starting to appreciate his marriage of color and vernacular architecture. For me, however, the extra and essential ingredient was twilight itself, transitional zones seen at a transitional time.
Just as twilight is a kind of fluid boundary between daylight and full night, parts of the city are boundaries between past and present, rural and urban, habitation and vacancy. Exploring the border between Brooklyn and Queens one evening, I discovered such a place behind the large neon Pepsi Cola sign on the East River. For years, I had seen that sign from the Manhattan side as a kind of commercial icon. Now, I was suddenly on a construction site, with bulldozers and backhoes parked for the night. The earth was beautifully plowed, dark brown and scored with tracks, as if on a farm. I was startled into a vision of Manhattan’s rural past, ensconced and hidden behind the great red sign.
Another encounter: Walking past a deserted roofless warehouse in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, I saw motion-sensitive security lights projecting slanting blocks of green and yellow light onto the vacant ground enclosed by the structure. This warehouse and the distant glowing Manhattan Bridge are part of today’s New York, but they are also a link to the vanished nineteenth-century commercial city. Even so, such a place is not merely about the contrast between past and present. The city has a way of devouring its past and creating not memorials to a specific time so much as monuments to erasure itself, signs of pure absence and vacancy.
As a flaneur and a voyeur, I like to work unobserved, relying on intuition and staying one step ahead of the wrecking ball. When I discover a site that attracts me, I return to it at dusk and maybe at dawn as well. The first few times, the atmospheric conditions or the artificial lighting may not be quite right. But on a subsequent visit, I may find that a streetlight has gone out, creating the odd shadow that makes the space more angular. I’m delighted by such discrepancies, which are nearly invisible during the daytime: the unexpected and asymmetric, the quietly out of kilter.
I’m a roamer of limbo regions, one of our last frontiers—places that seem unloved and overlooked, cracks in the urban facade. The long exposures—sometimes for up to a minute—required by the low light are my way of giving such places attention and respect. My goal is to allow for enough light to provide shadow detail and texture, but not to overexpose the film and lose detail in the highlights.
xt-indent: 36.0px; font: 12.0px Arial Narrow;">I recall Jane Goodall’s description of how, shining a flashlight beam at night, she saw a tunnel of color in the monochrome darkness. Goodall’s experience inspired me to see how colors flare up near streetlights and how the intense blue of the sky complements the ambers, yellows, and greens of artificial lights. Even with color film, the dusk is luminous. And, during the brief interval of twilight, color and light conspire to approach a higher level of abstraction—symbolized for me by the chromatic beam of Goodall’s flashlight.
While I wait for the light and shapes to register themselves on my film, a passerby might accidentally walk in front of my camera. At one time, these interlopers would have annoyed me. Recently, however, I have begun to appreciate such visits, welcoming these ghost-like shadowy figures into my photographs. Are they surrogates for me, actors hurrying across a set, or lost friends and relatives coming to people my nocturnal cityscapes? Whoever they are, these figures add to the feeling that something has just happened, that something is about to happen.
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3.14.09
Book release: NIGHT / SHIFT by Lynn Saville is now available for pre-sale
An exhibition of Lynn Saville's work will follow the release of the book from July 18 - August 22, 2009 at Kopeikin Gallery.
NIGHT / SHIFT by Lynn Saville will be released on May 18, 2009. The book (published by Random House and The Monacelli Press) includes her signature color photographs of offbeat New York cityscapes at twilight and at dawn. In describing Saville's work for the book's introduction, Arthur C. Danto writes, "Atget recorded Paris in the early morning, before anyone was about. We feel his presence in the surrounding emptiness he has kept for the generations...Saville is his New York counterpart, the Atget of vanishing New York, prowling her city at the other end of the day, picking up pieces of the past into the present, just before it is swallowed by shadows..." -
6.05.06
Times Square Nocturnes
Lynn Saville has seven large light boxes in the Times Square subway station, April 21-Dec. 31, 2006, entitled “Times Square Nocturnes by Lynn Saville." She will also present work in "Lynn Saville: The Color of Night,” Jan. 6 – July 1st President’s Gallery, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Saville's work will also appear in the following group shows: The Art of Photography Show, curated by Arthur Ollman, Lyceum Theatre Gallery, San Diego, CA, 2006 April 22-June 4th.
