Looking at photographers from Review LA…

I featured the work of Linda Morrow, after last year’s Review LA, when she was sharing her beautiful images from her series, Echoes of Ovid.

The Greenhouse, from Echoes of Ovid

This year, Linda produced a new project, Two Degrees of Endearment , comprised of a series of portraits made entirely in camera by using double exposure. The nuances and new facial blendings of these intimate portraits reflect the fleeting gestures of time passing and private moments never to be recaptured. After a career as an English professor, Linda took an early retirement to concentrate on her photographic studies after being inspired by workshop at Ghost Ranch down the road from Georgia O’Keefe’s former home in New Mexico.

Two Degrees of Endearment began when I knew I wanted to photograph the interplay between two people who are related to each other by virtue of blood and/or love. Made up of multiple dimensions that come with two exposures and a long shutter speed, the photographs are sometimes difficult to decipher and often pose more questions than they answer.

How do we reveal ourselves when in the presence of someone we are very close to? How do we react to this person in the course of a few seconds while the shutter is open? What unwritten drama lies behind a given image?

Beyond those moments of trust and tenderness, of playfulness and affection that appear in the pictures, the project is for me a case of trial and error, using time and light and being willing to accept the result as if each image were a found object, captured and suspended. Or, like those puzzle pictures from our childhood, a part of the photograph not immediately perceived will emerge and surprise us.

Experimentation and collaboration have been the means of making the images, but ultimately the work has come to be about relationship, randomness, and discovery.