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Lynn Swigart Trident Gallery, Gloucester, 2014 photo Tricia O’Neill |
Lynn Swigart Back Shore, Gloucester, 1979 photo: Leigh Swigart |
I’ve been making photographs almost all my life because it gives me great pleasure. I’m drawn to shapes and textures and the effect light has upon both. I enjoy the discovery of fascinating images in everyday things and places and the ability to capture them photographically. I hope my images may inspire others to look more carefully and enjoy this interesting and beautiful world passing before all of us.
The work selected for the portfolios on this site is a small sample of my entire body of work. It shows the variety of my interests in subject matter. The Gloucester series has been my largest subject. I first became acquainted with Gloucester in 1976 when I began photographing there. The project resulted in a book Olson’s Gloucester (LSU Press, 1980) and an exhibition that toured the country. The poet Charles Olson (1910–1970) had lived in Gloucester, and his extensive and important body of work The Maximus Poems mythologized the landscape and people of Gloucester and Cape Ann. By 1976, his work commanded international attention, and readers all over the world wanted to see the place so central to the poems.
I was among the first living artists to have work exhibited at the Cape Ann Museum (then the Cape Ann Historical Society) in 1980. Since that time, my work has been exhibited at the Museum a number of times including a retrospective in 2005. The Museum is accessioning an archive of my work and related photographic materials in 2018.
—Lynn Swigart, 2017