Between 2015 and 2018, Janelle Lynch photographed dense conjunctions of plants with an 8 × 10 camera, treating the landscape not as scenery but as a field of relationships. In Another Way of Looking at Love, branches, leaves, stems, and intervals of light become a language for considering disconnection—personal, social, and environmental—and the persistent desire to overcome it.
Lynch begins with details in nature that, from a particular position, appear to form enclosed geometries. Where similar and unlike biological elements meet, she locates a connective nucleus and makes it the plane of focus. The resulting photographs operate as still lifes found within the landscape: exacting observations in which proximity does not erase difference. Love, in this formulation, is less a declared emotion than an act of attention to contact, separation, and mutual dependence.
The work also reflects Lynch’s engagement with perceptual drawing and painting, especially charcoal mark-making. That parallel practice sharpened her inquiry into abstraction, relative color, and the way one form acquires meaning beside another. Large-format photography supports this patient scrutiny, holding fine natural detail while allowing the image to hover between botanical description and formal construction.
Published by Radius Books in 2018, the hardcover volume uses an accordion-fold structure—a particularly apt form for work concerned with continuity and relation. It permits individual images to retain their autonomy while belonging to an extended physical sequence. For collectors attentive to how photographic ideas are translated into book form, Another Way of Looking at Love merits consideration for the coherence between subject, method, and construction: landscape becomes metaphor, precise observation becomes ethical inquiry, and the book itself becomes a connected object.