About
Lynn Whitney is Associate Professor, emerita, School of Art, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. She served as Associate Director, 2017–2020, Studio Division Chair, 2006–2017 and head of Photography from 1987–2020. She earned her BA in American Culture Studies from Boston University, her BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, her MFA from Yale University School of Art. Among her awards, she has received commissions from the Toledo Museum of Art and the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland and an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council. Her work is in the collections of The Toledo Museum of Art, the George Gund Foundation, Columbia College’s Midwest Photographer’s Project, The Cleveland Clinic, Ohio Humanities Council, Southeast Center for Photographic Studies, and Yale University.
Statement
Making photographs is my means to pose and then, as thoughtfully as possible, examine the world and our place. The landscape figures prominently in all of my pictures and, as it is considered by some, to align with the female, these are often seen together, highlighting contemporary issues.
I use a large format and medium format film camera. Providing both a cover and a presence for whatever or whomever I might encounter, its generosity extends to my content.
My early pictures explored the farm, the military, the convent, and family. I was and remain curious about how individual beings remain as such within those constructions and commit to serve concerns larger than themselves. I wondered and marveled at their courage - through choice or lack of option - to dedicate themselves to a
lifelong endeavor.
My recent work, focused on Lake Erie, ties to earlier interests. Two commissions, the construction of the FIGG design Skyway bridge over the Maumee River (Toledo Ohio), from the Toledo Museum of Art, the other, Lake Erie along Cuyahoga county (Cleveland), from the George Gund Foundation, helped broaden and provided depth to my cultural questions and concerns.
Those concerns traveled with me to the Midwest, over thirty years ago, from my home where Henry David Thoreau lived, and wrote : "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Women and water are and have been seen as an endless resource to use, misuse, abuse. Placed together the pictures speak about fragility, vulnerability, and the seemingly endless capacity to ‘take it’. The nuances and qualities of the lake or the land mirror what we have done, to it, each other and ask what the chances for our collective future might be.