Photographer Lynn Stern brings 'Echoes of Light' to Obscura Gallery

For nearly 50 years, photographer Lynn Stern has been chasing light.

Her upcoming exhibition at Obscura Gallery in Santa Fe, “Echoes of Light,” lets viewers follow the subtle evolution of her luminous vision.

In the early days, Stern would rent a car and drive across the country to take minimalist landscape photographs of natural light in various locales.

“I would set out, not to see what was interesting, but looking for something in particular. And there were days when I couldn’t find it, and I wouldn’t take a single photograph,” Stern said. “And I thought, this is really frustrating and a waste of time and money. So, maybe there’s some way I can make it happen in the studio.”

So, when she returned to New York City, she went down to the fabric market and looked for white scrim she could set up in her studio to capture indirect light.

“I got a bunch of them and came home and tested them, and there was one (fabric) that just really worked,” she said. “It was a tight weave, and as soon as I put it up, even without anything there, it created this wonderful quality of a diffused glow of light.”

That was in 1985. The “Unveilings” photographs in her Obscura exhibition date from that year. They depict flowers with translucent petals backlit in front of the scrim.

Other works in the show, including her “Force Field” series, are from the 2020s, so “Echoes of Light” functions as a mini retrospective.

“For a couple of decades now, I’ve been working with objects placed behind the scrim, which does wonderful things,” Stern said. “It veils them, so they become less literal. It’s a little perverse, some people may think, that as a photographer I am not at all interested in capturing or recreating what’s in front of the camera. I’m interested in doing the reverse, in making it less literal — less about the thing itself — and more about the space and the light around it. I wanted (my work) to feel as though it’s the outer expression of something that’s unseen, but felt.”

This exhibition highlights the consistency of Stern’s practice over the decades, as well as the ways she has found to express new ideas and feelings within her overarching constraints.

Stern said she has been inspired at least as much by painters as photographers, and she sees her practice as “painting with light.” The monochrome painter Ad Reinhardt was an important early influence.

“I love Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, in particular,” Stern said. “There’s a quote of his that I use a lot. He said, ‘What’s not there is more important than what’s there.’ And I love that idea.”

The titles of many of Stern’s series, such as “Mystic Light,” “Passage” and “Quickening,” allude to spiritual experiences or states of being. But she said the “purest” states are beyond representation.

“There’s a wonderful quote by St. John of the Cross — who I don’t normally read, but I came across it — in which he says, ‘The purer light is, the less visible it is.’” Stern said. “You can only see the light itself by the reverberations it produces in its surroundings. You can’t photograph light. It’s nothing. It’s boring. It’s (just) space. So, I’m always looking for something that will create those reverberations.”

Although Stern’s work is pared down, sometimes to the verge of invisibility, she doesn’t call herself a minimalist.

“My work is pared down, but I don’t think of it as minimalist at all, in the sense that I think of real minimalist work as very, very cold,” Stern said. “My work, to me, has a lot of feeling in it. I hope other people see that.”

“I’m paring down to get at something essential,” she said.

“Echoes of Light” opens at Obscura Gallery on Friday, June 27, and runs through Aug. 9.

Photographer Lynn Stern brings 'Echoes of Light' to Obscura Gallery