Landscape nominee

Memory


In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthe wrote that “photography is the ability to capture time. The photograph is evidence that a moment existed.” A photograph is meant to plant the seeds of memory.

During Covid 19, in my series of photographs called Memory, I do capture a moment in time. However, it’s not the image we’d want to retain because of its richness or complexity, light or geometry. In fact, what I experience in shooting my Memory series is exactly the opposite of what Barthe stated about memory.

Here, before shooting each image, I try to think back and wish I had a picture or reference of what the space might have looked like. I know that life existed here, but it just picked up and disappeared.

These photographs show the fragility of the world we live in. They force us to conjure up scenarios of playgrounds full of children and restaurant parking lots full of cars and people. Without people as a reference, these images stand as monuments to another time. As with Easter Island, all that was left was monuments as clues to a civilization that had once existed.

Lisa Cutler is a New York-based photographer whose practice spans landscape, portraiture and street photography . Lisa turned to photography after a successful career as a television producer and director and then raising a family.
Lisa’s most notable recent project is a series of photographs that explore the urban landscape of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Lisa’s Red Hook series has recently received much acclaim and recognition. Red Hook was completed in 2019 and has gone on to be recognized by a number of awards. Red Hook was selected by The Los Angeles Center of Photography for its Project 2020 Exhibition and subsequently featured in Lenscratch and in Dodho Magazine. Photolucida’s Critical Mass 2020 named Red Hook as a Top 200 finalist. It also received an Honorable Mention at the Le Prix de la Photographie de Paris (2019).Red Hook also won the 2020 15th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers in non-professional cityscapes. Eight images from her Red Hook series were exhibited at the 6th Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography in Barcelona 2021. Red Hook was also named a finalist in the KLOMPCHING GALLERY Fresh 2020 exhibit.

Lisa's new series, Hidden Homes premiered at Foley Gallery in 2021.