Lynne Buchanan

Dear Dad:

It has been almost nine years since you died. I think about you often, especially given the state of our world. I remember our five-hour phone call when I lived in New York and the planes hit the World Trade Center. You didn’t have the answers, but it was a comfort talking with you when things were not making sense to me. You had one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered, and I keep wondering what insights you might offer if you were still here. As I now delve into your writings, the books you annotated, family photos, and the slides you took, I feel like I am meeting you in a deeper way.

After New College’s hostile conversion from the liberal arts college you helped found to a Christian religious school, I became obsessed with learning more about your journey. How did you come to have such an open mind? How did you manage to maintain such a zest for life after being orphaned? You must have realized at an early age that life was uncertain. Did that prompt you to cherish it even more? At this pivotal moment in history, when conflicts are looming everywhere, I am searching for ways to stay balanced and keep creating, so as not to live in apathy or fear. Did your ability to hold opposing viewpoints in irreducible tension help you make sense of your early faith, the loss of your parents and the turmoil surrounding World War II? Can the philosophy of the hyphen you developed help me and the rest of us now?

I remember typing the pages of the philosophy book you would never publish. Every time you got close to finishing it, your thinking would change and you’d throw what you’d written away because you realized that you had not arrived at the “Truth.” I couldn’t figure out why you were so preoccupied with identifying what truth was or how aghast you were when metaphors were taken literally. Your struggles make sense to me now that I’m an artist. After reading your dissertation on metaphor I no longer think as literally when I make work. The last thing I want is for people to feel they’ve figured everything out when they look at my images. Life is complicated.

I’m sorry I failed to tell you how much I appreciated all your lessons in critical thinking. When I was younger, I blamed you for my lack of self-confidence, since I thought it stemmed from your constant critques of my thought processes. Now I’m grateful you taught me to care about truth, to open my eyes to different perspectives, to experiment, to keep searching for the light in uncertain times, and most importantly to admit when I am wrong. Your tractatus on education even inspired me to write my own on creativity and connecting with spirit in nature.

Your earthly body may have left us, but you live on in the thoughts you shared with me and others that have rippled out into the world. I am so grateful for the time that we shared together on this earth.  Love always,

Lynne

Artist Bio

Lynne Buchanan is a lens-based artist based in Western North Carolina. Her work explores her intimate connection to the natural world and how her perceptions of biodiversity in the environment influence her philosophy of life. Buchanan’s images examine identity in difference, interconnection, memory, ancestral lines, the history of place, metaphor, meaning, and contextual truth.
Buchanan began her photographic life as an environmental photographer. The ecological issues she witnessed impacted her psychologically, and she began creating work that was more emotional, often working in black and white.

Buchanan holds a Master’s Degree in Art History and Museum Studies from George Washington University. She is a self-taught photographer and multimedia artist. Mentors include Clyde Butcher and Jill Enfield, and she learned the Malde-Ware platinum-palladium print-out method from Pradip Malde. Buchanan often prints in these rare metals to evoke the preciousness of life and to preserve transitory states of being in a lasting way. She feels introducing her own hand into the process deepens her connection with the subjects she photographs and connects her subjective experiences with objective reality.
Buchanan is the author of two books: Florida’s Changing Waters: A Beautiful World in Peril and The Poetry of Being, for which she received Silver Medals in the Tokyo and Budapest International Photography Awards. Her books are in libraries and university collections across the country.

She has spoken about her work at the Miami Book Fair, the Society for Environmental Journalism, and the North American Nature Photography Summit. Buchanan was selected to attend Review Santa Fe twice and has been recognized as a Top 200 artist by Critical Mass. Her work has been reviewed in numerous print and online publications, and she has contributed articles to Waterkeeper Magazine, even traveling to Bangladesh to work with waterkeepers there.

Her award-winning photography has been exhibited nationally and internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, and is in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Bradenton, Florida.