Lynn Geesaman: Images

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 1992 that led her into color. She found that particular landscape unsuitable to her black-and-white aesthetic. Challenged, she took up color film and taught herself chromogenic printing—pushing the boundaries of this process. As her color work progressed, it became more and more abstract; her colors more surreal, more imagined, and closer to painting than traditional color photography. In 2007 she took her last black-and-white photographs, and in 2009 her last color. Published in conjunction with Geesaman’s first retrospective exhibition organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art, and her first to include both her black and white and her color photographs, the book was designed by Eleanor Caponigro and printed by Trifolio in Verona, Italy. The black and white photos were printed in tri-tone with varnish and the color photos were printed with Trifolio’s unique AreaW4, a high-performance unique offset process that is used for superior art reproduction.