2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageTrue Pursuits
Janelle Lynch
Saturday, November 09 - 3:00PM to 3:45PM
As a New York-based photographer, educator, and freelance writer, I am keenly aware of
photography's new technologies and applications as seen in galleries, colleagues' studios,
the classroom, and in the books I review for publication. They represent innovative
advancements along the continuum of photography's evolution. In my own practice,
however, I continue to use the 8-x-10-inch Deardorff that in 1999, Stephen Shore, my
graduate school critique teacher and later a mentor, urged me to try because he rightly
believed it complemented my temperament and photographic interests.
Using as a framework images and text from my second monograph Janelle Lynch: Barcelona
(Radius Books, Fall 2013), I propose to the Society of Photographic Educators True Pursuits, a
presentation for the Northeast Regional Conference. I will discuss why I work as a large-format
film photographer rather than utilizing new technologies, and the personal, historical,
creative, and literary influences that are integral to my practice. I will argue that students
must be exposed to a range of instruments and influences so that they can decide what best
suits their process, temperament, interests, and creative goals.
Barcelona expands on my long-term interest in representations of the life cycle in the
landscape. It contains five series of photographs-four color and my first black and white
project-that I made between 2007 and 2011 while living in Spain. There, simultaneously
cognizant of my influences and respectful of my intuitive process, I explored the fallow
landscape outside of the city, photographing traces of existence-pylons, puddles, leaves,
and litter-as metaphors for absence and presence, mourning and remembrance. The
images show the terrain around the Llobregat River and Rub stream: unpeopled yet layered
with palpable suggestions of life, past and present.
My writings are interwoven throughout the book beginning with The Window, a short memoir
about how, as a child, I learned from my grandmother-one of my greatest influences-to
observe and appreciate nature. Other text precedes each series of photographs and offers
insight into other influences: Roland Barthes, whose journal entries in Mourning Diaries
informed my conceptual investigation; Charles Burchfield, whose commitment to honoring
his artistic freedom as a watercolorist inspired-and liberated-my vision; Wendell Berry,
whose essay The Unforeseen Wilderness transformed my process. The project is an inquiry into
the intangible presence of significant relationships or influences that remain despite physical
absence or loss, and exemplifies a vision tailored to the personal, not to current trends.
I will also discuss how my experiences as a mentee have informed my pedagogy. In addition
to Stephen Shore, my practice has been guided by other significant mentors, among them,
Eric Weeks, who introduced me to the idea of developing a relationship with my camera, not
merely using it as a tool, and Tony Bannon, who reinforced my belief that my photographic
pursuits must be "true" to me.
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