The Poetry of Being with Lynne Buchanan
The Poetry of Being
with Lynne Buchanan
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, May 24th, at 7 pm EDT
This week, we will be speaking with Lynne Buchanan about her new book The Poetry of Being which features photographs and poetry created by Lynne while navigating the unique challenges of caring for an aging mother. Her stunning black and white landscape photographs and haiku poems are interspersed throughout the book along with an essay by photographer and professor Pradip Malde which celebrates Lynne’s approach to seeing and honoring the sensory and emotional elements of the landscape. From Pradip, “The Poetry of Being, holds our attention so that we may contemplate and stay with silence, solitude, mortality, and chaos, all of which would otherwise leave us feeling fragile, vulnerable, and hopeless.” But here, Lynne’s powerful work invites us to “take a step towards hope.”
Remarkably, Lynne did not travel to distant places to find and document layered beauty; she walked out her door and took notice of the world at her feet. For Lynne, photographing ordinary things in her immediate environment taught her compassion for all living things, especially those that have been harmed or are different. The Poetry of Being celebrates every stage of being, including the transition to nonexistence.
This week we will be exploring the intersection of images and words as we consider what it means to allow our perspective to be shaped and informed by the constraints of our personal lives. Together we will ponder what it means to see the natural world as it is, and how photography invites us to expand beyond the limitations of our own psyches by allowing our work to take on a life of its own.
Lynne Buchanan earned a B.A. in art history from New College in Sarasota, and an M.A. in creative writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa and an M.A. in art history/museum studies from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She is the author and photographer of Florida’s Changing Waters: A Beautiful World in Peril, which was published by George F. Thompson Publishing, L.L.C. in 2019. Her latest book, The Poetry of Being, published by Daylight Books. Her award-winning photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Florida and across the country. She was recognized as one of Photolucida’s Top 200 finalists in 2016. In 2023, Lynne received honorable mention for her platinum-palladium series The Poetry of Being, as well as honorable mentions for three single wildlife images and one in the cellphone category in the 19th Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. She also received honorable mention for her Wanderings in Wild Places platinum palladium series in the 19th Pollux Awards. Her work was included in the Julia Margaret Cameron Gala Exhibition at Fotonostrum in Barcelona in April 2023, and it will be included in the the Pollux Awards exhibition at Fotonostrum in December 2023.
See South X Southeast Photo Magazines feature of Lynne’s book here.
