Borrowing from the formal conventions of painting, Jocelyn Lee lends a certain temporal permanence to her subjects while maintaining the potency of the open ended photographic narrative. Manoeuvring back and forth between levels of intimacy and unease, Lee also purposely looks for spaces that are not to distracting, to encourage the viewer to focus on the individual and psychological exchange of the portrait for pertinent clues.
Read MoreWhen she makes the picture, Lee prefers to wait for the moment when her subjects 'breath their own life into the room' and are no longer aware of the camera. Yet for all their transparency and brilliant details, her subjects, their stories, remain unknown, deftly eclipsing the camera's attempts to capture them.
In addition to portraiture Lee trains her camera in landscape and interior photography. Consistent in her work is a focus on the visual and tactile qualities of the material world, emphasising the chromatic and textural richness of flesh, fabrics, and foliage. Her fascination with the physical and psychological transitions of people has produced incisive portraits that capture the fraught passage from adolescence to adulthood, as well as the changes that aging registers on the face and body.
Jocelyn Lee (1962, Naples, Italy) received a BA from Yale University in 1986 and an MFA in Photography from the City University of New York at Hunter College in 1992.
Her works are in the collections of Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, France; The Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; The List Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, NC; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; and Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; as well as numerous private collections. Her work has appeared in many national and international publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Photo Raw (Helsinki, Finland), Snoeks (Germany), Real Simple, MORE magazine, PDN, Allegra (The Netherlands), DoubleTake, the Hayden Review, Marie Claire (Taiwan), Harpers and others.
Text courtesy FLATLAND.
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