Lynn Saville: Dark Cities
On the occasion of the first anniversary of the activity, Alessia Paladini Gallery is pleased to announce Lynn Saville’s solo exhibition “Dark Cities”.
On display, a selection of 20 color works, mainly shot in New York and Brooklyn. The American critic Arthur C. Danto describes Lynn Saville as “the New York answer to Eugène Atget, because he wanders around his city at the end of the day, picking up the fragments of the past as they pass into the present, shortly before to be swallowed by the shadows”.
Shooting at sunrise or sunset – stealthily positioning the easel so as not to attract the attention of the police – the artist portrays places emptied of their primary dimension, which becomes another, almost a film set behind which they reveal themselves abandonments due to the rampant financial crisis, or to building expansions that erase a past made up of people and customs by now obsolete. They are also photographs made of expectations, it almost seems that these places are waiting for a new possibility of regeneration. The almost total absence of human presence in Lynn Saville’s photographs facilitates this impression of transformations in the making, imaginary: the few passers-by appear stealthily, almost ghosts, often out of focus (also thanks to the long exposures required by the little natural light).
Lynn Saville does not take an openly critical position towards the issues of urban development; rather, her reflection turns to the visible signs that economic changes operate on the urban fabric. Her social commitment is present, but it does not interfere with her sense of color and light, of composition or with her curiosity towards the “invisible hand” of the real estate market and the evident effects of her on everyone’s life. In this way, Lynn Saville transforms the ordinary, filling the gaps with imaginary depth.
In her iridescent, enigmatic photographs, Lynne Saville conveys the visual and emotional ambivalence of the moment of transition between night and day, suggesting the contrast between what is visible and what is not; her images suspend time, depriving urban landscapes of their usual characteristics and inhabitants.
Realism is the familiar figure of street photography. It, therefore, becomes fascinating when an artist transcends the genre using a different approach. Alongside the lyricism of Helen Levitt or the romanticism of Saul Leiter, Lynn Saville first turns her gaze to the concreteness of the landscape’s urban areas to then search for and reveal the secret lives of these structures’ hidden and unpredictable sides.
About the Author
Fine-art photographer Lynn Saville was educated at Duke University and Pratt Institute. Saville specializes in photographing cities and rural settings at twilight and dawn, or as she describes it, “the boundary times between night and day.”
Her photographs are published in four monographs: Acquainted With the Night(Rizzoli, 1997); Night/Shift, with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto (Random House/Monacelli, 2009); Dark City, with an introduction by award-winning critic Geoff Dyer (Damiani, Bologna, 2015) and Lost: New York (Kris Graves Projects, New York, 2018). Saville’s photography is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York and is in the permanent art collections of major museums, corporations, and individuals. She lives in New York City with her husband, the poet Philip Fried.
LYNN SAVILLE: DARK CITIES
until MARCH 26, 2022
Alessia Paladini Gallery, Milan, Italy
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