Mark Your Calendar: Lynn Butler Canine Photo Exhibition & Book Signing

Lynn H. Butler

Going to the Dog Show

11 January – 23 February 2013

Opening reception: Thursday, 10 January, 6 to 8 PM    

Book signing and special opening February 9^th 1 to 5 PM

Her images, reflect her deep concerns for the protection of the landscapes and animals that are her artistic canvases. 

 Dogs and their skills have been adapting to human needs as long as there’s been civilization. These loyal animals serve as emergency responders, drug enforcement agents, herders, and assistants for the disabled. As workhorses, dogs are as diverse as they come, suited to any number of tasks requiring brute strength or patience and gentleness.

As if the range in dogs’ long, varied work history wasn’t enough, they’ve been judged in shows since the mid-19th century, where experts apply specific metrics to their agility, poise, intelligence and attractiveness. They’re tolerant creatures, learning through intensive training to practice show rituals that test and measure the very qualities dogs have long been prized for.

Both nature and nurture factor into canine behaviors, with breeders who for generations have been selecting genetics for temperament, ability to learn or good physical stamina. But as much as humans have shaped dogs through selective breeding, dogs too can shape their masters, offering themselves as companions and as friends.

She is a distinguished member of the New York Stereoscopic Society, has had her three-dimensional (3-D) photography exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

She was born in New York, studied violin at Juilliard and graduated from Hamilton College in 1974 as well as from the Certificate Program at the ICP in 1984. She has had more than 45 solo exhibitions including a one-person show at Leica Gallery in 1996 and her work has appeared in more than 100 group exhibitions throughout the world. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of such renowned institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the ICP, New York; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; the University of Texas, Austin; and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Butler’s work has appeared in such publications as LIFE, Geo, Aperture and The New York Times. Her published monographs includeA Passage Through the Land of Sleepy Hollow (1988), Coney Island Kaleidoscope (1991), Toxic Circles (1993), Imperiled Landscapes – Endangered Legends (1997) and A Plant Once Uprooted (2002).

She photographs from horseback, motorcycles, planes, amusement rides, trains and anything else that is moving. She also documents her life with raising and showing collies. Says Butler: “My photographs are taken with long exposures and extremely slow shutter speeds to capture the changing landscape…. Viewing life as it is today while referring to the past in a prevalent force in my subject matter.” The images in this exhibition, while highlighting both the diversity of her subject matter and the variety of her photographic techniques, are unified by a stylistic tone that leaves room to the imagination where the line between fantasy and reality is blurred.

“Butler’s photographs… are filled with a feeling of movement, a loss of detail, and undulating color – photographs at once evocative and poetic. Lynn Butler… has created works which are essentially about time and place; textures, colors, and ambiguous forms; landscapes and her feeling concerning them… and we respond strongly, viscerally, to a disquietingly strange but powerful and wholly singular beauty.”

The quality of the light, the beauty of the colors, the optical sensations all contribute to an added dimension in Butler’s photographs. They are, at once, both romantic and mysterious, both otherworldly and unique. As its curators, it gives us great pleasure to present Lynn Butler’s work and we hope that you find it, as did Barbara Head Millstein, the former Photography Curator of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, “thoroughly satisfying.”

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Posted by Tom on Feb 1 2013. Filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.