Lynn Geesaman

Parc de Sceaux, France (10-08-34c-10), 2008

Lynn Geesaman Biography Born in Cleveland in 1938, Lynn Geesaman was introduced to photography while studying physics at Wellesley College, from which she graduated in 1960. She took up photography starting in the 1980s as she developed an interest in gardens that led to research, travel, and photography in England, France, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. Looking at Lynn Geesaman’s photos, one might see an ethereal, fantasy-like quality to them. Her subjects included topiaries, formal gardens popular in Europe, and ancient landscapes pruned and sculpted by gardeners for hundreds of years to achieve the desired effects. They almost look like paintings with brushstrokes making rows of trees and shrubberies disappear into the horizon. Geesaman’s process intensified colors and gave her photographs a soft quality evocative of a dreamy, misty scene that alters the ordinary view of what someone would see if they traveled to see these gardens themselves. Rather than viewing them through ordinary eyes, Geesaman’s work views formal gardens through the lens of a squinted eye on the edge of sleep or in a relaxed state of awareness Lynn Geesaman’s black-and-white photographs, taken in Belgium in the early to mid-1990s, are equally as stunning to the eye. Uniform rows of slender trees turn into abstract parallel lines that vanish into a far-off point, Lynn Geesaman has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe including Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, The American Cultural Center, Brussels, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. She has received many honors including the Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and the Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship Award. Enthusiasts of her work can find three published collections of Lynn Geesaman’s photography: Poetics of Place, Gardenscapes, and Hazy Lights and Shadows: Lynn Geesaman. Lynn Geesaman passed away in 2020 after a 40-year career as a photographer and mathematician. Her legacy lives on and her work will stay alive forever.