STONE RIDGE, New York — In 2015, once I was engaged on the monograph Thomas Nozkowski, the artist gave me a duplicate of his catalogue An Autobiography, which paired his work with Judy Linn’s black and white pictures. Nozkowski had gridded off squares connecting the 2 locations the place he lived: Hester Avenue in New York Metropolis’s Decrease East Facet and his home in Excessive Falls, New York. He had lived his total life within the geographic space demarcated by the Catskills and Decrease Manhattan. Starting with Hester Avenue and culminating with rose bushes exterior his home within the Catskills, Linn took pictures of one thing inside every gridded sq..
Two years later, I noticed a bunch of Linn’s pictures in Deana Lawson, Judy Linn, Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Sikkema Jenkins, which I reviewed, after which encountered her work once more in Judy Linn: LUNCH on the CUE Artwork Basis (2018), curated by the artist Arlene Shechet. In my evaluation of the latter exhibition, I wrote, “Linn is not better known because she has never identified herself with a specific subject or style. In this she shares something with her longtime friend, Thomas Nozkowski […].” Greater than painters, I feel photographers are pressured into singling out a topic or honing a mode. The absence of those two traits led me to look deeper into Linn’s work.
Judy Linn, “acute angle tree” (2018)
After seeing these two exhibits, I purchased Linn’s solely monograph, Patti Smith 1969–1976 (Abrams Picture, 2011). In contrast to different books centered on a celeb, the 2 artists had a detailed friendship that began after they have been, to make use of the title of Smith’s memoir, simply children. With all that I had now discovered about Linn’s work, it turned clear that I had solely glimpsed the tip of an iceberg. This sense solely deepened once I spent the afternoon at her home in Stone Ridge trying by way of her pictures. Organizing her work into groupings equivalent to individuals, locations, and issues, and zeroing in on one, can be the apparent and straightforward technique to write about it, however in Linn’s case this turned out to be unimaginable.
Earlier than my go to, I had my favorites, equivalent to “tilted house” (2002), “fish east broadway” (1995), and “dendur” (2001), however once I noticed the colour {photograph} “frozen piss,” one thing clicked. On a grey stretch of pavement in entrance of a brick wall, a discolored puddle of piss has frozen into the form of an elephant. This picture of an unappealing topic was a reminder of how banal, soiled, and weirdly lovely dwelling in New York could be. But it was the form that made me look longer.
Judy Linn, “frozen piss” (1997)
Judy Linn, “slurpy” (2011)
Henri Cartier-Bresson is greatest identified for his guide The Decisive Second (1952), which launched its title phrase into the photographic lexicon. It’s incessantly introduced up in discussions of road photographers as numerous as Walker Evans, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Rudy Burckhardt, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to call essentially the most distinguished. Cartier-Bresson’s phrase and humanist pictures recall to mind Charles Baudelaire’s description of the flaneur in his groundbreaking essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863, translated by Thom Mayne):
The group is his area, simply because the air is the hen’s, and water that of the fish. His ardour and his occupation is to merge with the gang. For the right loafer, for the passionate observer it turns into an immense supply of enjoyment to ascertain his dwelling within the throng, within the ebb and stream, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from dwelling and but to really feel at dwelling anyplace […]. The observer is a prince having fun with his incognito wherever he goes.
Baudelaire and Cartier-Bresson are discussing males. What about ladies road photographers like Linn, in addition to Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, and others? Are they having fun with being incognito wherever they go, or are they, as in Maier’s pictures, registering the diploma of their invisibility?
Judy Linn, “untitled” (1994)
Linn’s “fish east broadway” is emblematic of her road pictures, which she has been taking for the reason that late Sixties — a museum survey is lengthy overdue. Standing exterior a restaurant in New York Metropolis’s Chinatown, she pictures a single carp within the fish tank. The {photograph} consists of washed-out grays. Essentially the most salient presence is the carp trying on the viewer. On the appropriate, we are able to see somebody strolling away. Between the individual and the fish are the faint legs of individuals standing collectively. Irrespective of a lot we glance into the {photograph}, all the pieces appears on the point of being erased by the sunshine. I consider the picture as a self-portrait of Linn as a flaneuse.
Linn’s digicam doesn’t register her absence, because it did for Maier when she photographed her shadow on the again of an individual standing far in entrance of her. Somewhat, it registers her solitariness from the world during which she is immersed. She appears to drift, suspended, a bodiless eye. Linn’s “decisive moment” is the isolation of dwelling invisibly on this planet. Beginning with “frozen piss,” that is what the pictures I’ve gravitated towards have in widespread: Individuals are both absent or unseen, as in “happy car,” which Linn took whereas visiting Levitt, a longtime good friend, in Roxbury, New York. Within the black and white “slurpy” and the colour {photograph} “foam on snow,” she information traces of people and their wasteful existence, as if commenting on their very own briefness.
Each the willpower and vulnerability of photographing her surroundings, be it the East Village earlier than it turned gentrified or upstate New York, the place she now lives, are emblematized in her {photograph} “icicle” (2024). Agency however breakable, the icicle’s existence will go unnoticed, as one season modifications into the following. What’s going to stay is the {photograph}. And if not that, a digital picture that someday could also be retrieved.
Judy Linn, “foam on snow” (2017)
Judy Linn, “happy car” (1995)
