African American Writers: Portraits and Visions

Photo of poet June Jordan taken by Lynda Koolish.

African American Writers: Portraits and Visions

Photographs by Lynda Koolish
Exhibit
Monday, Apr 1, 2002 12:00 am -

Photographer and literature scholar Lynda Koolish celebrates in her work the “passion, the ethical and creative genius” of the writers whose work she deeply admires. In describing her photographs, Koolish explains: “Despite the intensely personal quality of my work, it is, in its deepest sense, a collaboration. I try to listen with my eyes, pay profound attention to the self that someone else is revealing to me. As an artist, a photographer paints with light. How the subject looks psychologically and visually is determined by how the light falls, the way shadows form, creating and reflecting a sense of inner luminescence. I try to photograph at the moment of spontaneous convergence of what is visually exciting and what moves me emotionally. Sometimes, the photograph, like a poem, becomes a window filled with light.”

Koolish’s work has been exhibited at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and at the Jewett Gallery of the San Francisco Public Library.

The exhibition was co-sponsored with Pen West (American Center) and the Department of African American Studies.