Lynn Whitney has been fascinated with photography for as long as she can remember and has spent her life following that fascination into a career. After making images of the Lake Erie landscape for over a decade, Whitney has compiled her work to create a photo-book, Lake Erie.
First introduced to photography in her hometown in Massachusetts by her father, a WWII veteran who was asked by his military superiors to take photos of the liberation of concentration camps. With a father who was always taking pictures and videos as Whitney was growing up, she was inspired to do the same.
A snapshot in time
In college, she continued to pursue photography but harbored doubts about whether it was the right path for her. Then Whitney saw an image of an androgynous farm boy taken by Paul Strand which helped her realize that photography is what she was meant to do. “He looked at me and I looked at him in this image and I thought that’s what I want to do,” Whitney said. “Because you can go out and bring home everything, every person, everything you love.”
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After that experience, Whitney became more confident in her photography and began venturing out, meeting new people and visiting new places. Other large scale projects that she is extremely proud of are her captured images of farm animals, the Army Reserves and of sisters at a convent.
Whitney’s camera of choice for all her projects is a view camera, which is a lot more cumbersome than a digital camera and takes longer to set up and take pictures. She develops the film herself in a dark room. “The effort, the physical effort is tied to the emotions and the psychology and it really reinforces the individual identity,” she said.
Moving to Northwest Ohio
Whitney moved to the Toledo area in 1987 to teach photography at Bowling Green State University and for a long time avoided visiting Lake Erie because of the environmental challenges the Lake faced in the 60s and 70s.
Her mother, having grown up in the Toledo area, often told Whitney stories of Lake Erie. “But as I came of age in the 1960s and 1970s this memory was upended, of course, by news reports that cast Lake Erie as a less-than-great lake,” Whitney relates in the introduction to her book.
In 2009, the Gund Foundation in Cleveland commissioned Whitney to take photos of Lake Erie which began her journey with Lake Erie. Working with the Gund Foundation gave Whitney access to places that she wouldn’t have been able to go on her own. She was able to take photos on private property.
This commission allowed Whitney to see the potential in Lake Erie and she continued making images of the Lake. In 2013 an event pushed her closer to creating her book when her friend and co-worker Dawn Glanz was murdered. About a year later, as she was taking photos near Sandusky, Whitney saw a woman watering flowers that looked just like Glanz.
She asked to take a photo of the woman and was kindly granted permission. That photo made her realize that all the photos in her book, Lake Erie, have some connection to her own story or the female story. Finally, when she retired from her teaching position at BGSU, Whitney decided that it was time to take her collection of photos of Lake Erie and create something for a larger audience to see. The book consists of her collection of photos of Lake Erie spanning across the 96-mile stretch between Toledo and Cleveland.
On Saturday, Aug. 10, Whitney is the featured speaker at the Toledo Museum of Art where she will discuss her book and her inspiration. For more information or to purchase a copy visit lynnwhitneyphotographs.com.
