‘Dark City: Urban America at Night’
Taken at twilight and dawn, Lynn Saville‘s photographs bring us deep into an urban landscape where busy city streets are rendered quiet and emptied of people, except for the occasional lone figure or the artist herself, visible as ghosted images or shadows. The darkened city is Saville’s stage, with dramatic lighting and architectural components forming otherworldly places and spaces that are photographed quickly with her medium-format camera so as not to attract police attention.
Drawn to central and fringe areas that have been affected by the recent economic downturn, Saville captures vacant and shuttered storefronts, empty lots, abandoned buildings, blank billboards and back alleys that exhibit a disquieting beauty.
Saville moves through spaces between buildings and other structures that mark and define the worlds of urban dwellers. When the sun begins to set, a new world emerges, created by artificial lights that illuminate and cast shadows on grand and simple buildings, street signs and detritus from the day’s activities. What is left behind or remains on city streets is what forms the elements Saville uses to construct her images.
The fine-art photographer was educated at Duke University and Pratt Institute. She specializes in photographing cities at twilight and dawn ? or, as she describes it, “the boundary times between night and day.” Her photographs have been widely exhibited in the U.S. and abroad. Dark City: Urban America at Night, published by Damiani in 2015, is her third book, with an introduction by the well-known British critic Geoff Dyer. Her two previous monographs are Acquainted With the Night (Rizzoli, 1997) and Night/Shift (Random House/Monacelli, 2009), with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto. Saville has won a number of awards, including fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts; a premio in the Scanno, Italy, Festival of Photography; and first place in the architecture category, Women in Photography International. Her work is represented by the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York and is in the permanent art collections of major museums, corporations and individuals. She lives in New York City with her husband, poet Philip Fried.
Saville’s Dark City: Urban America at Night series will be featured in solo exhibitions opening this summer and fall at three locations: the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Ala., July 2-Sept. 25; the Galerie Baudoin Lebon in Paris, Sept. 14-Oct. 31; and the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, Oct. 5-Dec. 15. The exhibitions are accompanied by Saville’s critically acclaimed monograph of the same title published by Damiani, which features an essay by the renowned British critic Geoff Dyer.
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