Lynn PortThere is a particular quality of light that has been described by Paul Guinard as "inner, incorporeal light which flows everywhere inexhaustibly and is the manifestation of energy, life and movement." That quality of luminosity, which partakes of both space and energy, is of primary importance in my work.

I photograph exclusively in natural light: more specifically, indirect natural light. Sunlight creates shadows, patterns and an emphasis on surface, whereas indirect light seems to emanate from within and to be part of space itself. In Extended Landscapes it is the radiant, even shadowless light of mid-day that animates the space, while in the Forebodings series (Central Park), it is overcast light whose ambient glow creates a sense of imminence. And in my studio work — the Unveilings, Whiteness, Skulls, Animus and Veiled Still Lifes series — it is North light that flows from behind, through the translucent white fabric. (The Animus photographs are printed in reverse).

For me, luminosity is intimately linked with three-dimensionality: the spatial dynamics I seek are those which draw one back through the photograph (as in the Interior Light, Whiteness and Extended

Landscapes series), or simultaneously project forward toward the viewer (as in the Forebodings series.) And I am particularly drawn to negative space — 'emptiness,' in which nothing is visible but much is happening.

Tension and a sense of movement are extremely important to me, and have become even more so in the last two decades: beginning with the Unveilings series, and continuously since the late 1980's, I have been working inside — in both senses of the word: creating images in the studio rather than looking for them outside, and exploring imagery that looks inward rather than outward. In this studio work I am as interested in the spaces between objects as I am in the objects themselves, however compelling their forms may be. Hence, the Unveilings and Skulls series do not focus just on flowers and skulls; rather, it is the shifting relationships — the energy released — between object and fabric that give both the flowers and the skulls their emotional qualities. To maximize these dynamics, the fabric is differently composed in each image. In the Dispossession series, one might even say that the emotional core of the work is neither skull nor deathmask but literally the empty space between the 		two: for this series is not about the fact of death but about the idea of death — the attempt to imagine it. Hence the importance of the fluid and utterly ambiguous relationship between skull and deathmask. This sense of tension — psychological as well as formal — is heightened further in the Animus series: here, multiple objects (skulls and light figures) seem to engage in an elemental struggle, while simultaneously being pulled out of or into the dark ground.

My images are consciously pared down, often to extremes. In the desert photographs, details in the landscape serve only to pull the eye back toward the horizon, which is felt as an opening to infinity; in the Whiteness series, I have virtually eliminated elements traditionally considered essential to photographs — detail, focus, subject, tonal range, composition — with the intention of distilling the composite forms of the White Compositions into one indivisible and magnetic image; and in the Animus series, the blurred contours, soft focus and lack of detail render
the skulls at once abstract yet quintessentially
skull-like. Throughout the work, I am compelled, not by a formal interest in minimalism, but by an emotional sense that, as Ad Reinhardt said, "what is not there is more important than what is there."
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