Red Berries

For two decades, Janelle Lynch has studied perception, experience, and discovery through the art of large-format photography. In 2015, she began an intensive focus on trees, plants, and flowers on her property in the Catskills. Returning again and again to these often overlooked forest details during all seasons over three years, she created a body of work that encourages us to look closer and to think more deeply about our natural surroundings.

The series’ title, Another Way of Looking at Love, is a quote from contemporary Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton, who upholds neuroscientific research that humans are biologically hardwired to connect, that our personal and cultural well-being depends on this, and that love is about long-term, proactive commitment. These ideas resonated with Lynch, who related them to her own work reimagining our relationship to nature, the planet, and each other. For her, these concepts paralleled the visual connections she composed in her photographs, where, compressed to two dimensions, stems and branches joined into delicate shapes unnoticed by the naked eye.

Radius Books published a limited edition accordion portfolio with five original photographs from Another Way of Looking at Love. Darius Himes, International Head of the Photographs Department at Christie’s Auction House, co-founder of Radius Books, and author of the essay in the portfolio, reminds us to look beyond the surface beauty of these images and find “the mystery of the artist’s own inner landscape. In short, she is in love . . . . What lies beneath these photographs of backyard verdure is love.”