STONE RIDGE, New York — In 2015, when I was working on the monograph Thomas Nozkowski, the artist gave me a copy of his catalogue An Autobiography, which paired his paintings with Judy Linn’s black and white photographs. Nozkowski had gridded off squares connecting the two places where he lived: Hester Street in New York City’s Lower East Side and his house in High Falls, New York. He had lived his entire life in the geographic area demarcated by the Catskills and Lower Manhattan. Beginning with Hester Street and culminating with rose bushes outside his house in the Catskills, Linn took photographs of something within each gridded square.
Two years later, I saw a group of Linn’s photographs in Deana Lawson, Judy Linn, Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Sikkema Jenkins, which I reviewed, and then encountered her work again in Judy Linn: LUNCH at the CUE Art Foundation (2018), curated by the artist Arlene Shechet. In my review of the latter exhibition, I wrote, “Linn is not better known because she has never identified herself with a specific subject or style. In this she shares something with her longtime friend, Thomas Nozkowski […].” More than painters, I think photographers are pressured into singling out a subject or honing a style. The absence of these two characteristics led me to look deeper into Linn’s work.
After seeing these two shows, I bought Linn’s only monograph, Patti Smith 1969–1976 (Abrams Image, 2011). Unlike other books focused on a celebrity, the two artists had a close friendship that started when they were, to use the title of Smith’s memoir, just kids. With all that I had now learned about Linn’s work, it became clear that I had only glimpsed the tip of an iceberg. This feeling only deepened when I spent the afternoon at her house in Stone Ridge looking through her photographs. Organizing her work into groupings such as people, places, and things, and zeroing in on one, would be the obvious and easy way to write about it, but in Linn’s case this turned out to be impossible.
Before my visit, I had my favorites, such as “tilted house” (2002), “fish east broadway” (1995), and “dendur” (2001), but when I saw the color photograph “frozen piss,” something clicked. On a gray stretch of pavement in front of a brick wall, a discolored puddle of piss has frozen into the shape of an elephant. This image of an unappealing subject was a reminder of how banal, dirty, and weirdly beautiful living in New York can be. Yet it was the shape that made me look longer.
Henri Cartier-Bresson is best known for his book The Decisive Moment (1952), which introduced its title phrase into the photographic lexicon. It is frequently brought up in discussions of street photographers as diverse as Walker Evans, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Rudy Burckhardt, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to name the most prominent. Cartier-Bresson’s phrase and humanist photographs bring to mind Charles Baudelaire’s description of the flaneur in his groundbreaking essay, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863, translated by Thom Mayne):
The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere […]. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
Baudelaire and Cartier-Bresson are discussing men. What about women street photographers like Linn, as well as Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Vivian Maier, and others? Are they enjoying being incognito wherever they go, or are they, as in Maier’s photographs, registering the degree of their invisibility?
Linn’s “fish east broadway” is emblematic of her street photographs, which she has been taking since the late 1960s — a museum survey is long overdue. Standing outside a restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown, she photographs a single carp in the fish tank. The photograph is composed of washed-out grays. The most salient presence is the carp looking at the viewer. On the right, we can see someone walking away. Between the person and the fish are the faint legs of people standing together. No matter much we look into the photograph, everything seems on the brink of being erased by the light. I think of the image as a self-portrait of Linn as a flaneuse.
Linn’s camera doesn’t register her absence, as it did for Maier when she photographed her shadow on the back of a person standing some distance in front of her. Rather, it registers her solitariness from the world in which she is immersed. She seems to float, suspended, a bodiless eye. Linn’s “decisive moment” is the isolation of living invisibly in the world. Starting with “frozen piss,” this is what the photographs I’ve gravitated toward have in common: People are either absent or unseen, as in “happy car,” which Linn took while visiting Levitt, a longtime friend, in Roxbury, New York. In the black and white “slurpy” and the color photograph “foam on snow,” she records traces of humans and their wasteful existence, as if commenting on their own briefness.
Both the determination and vulnerability of photographing her environment, be it the East Village before it became gentrified or upstate New York, where she now lives, are emblematized in her photograph “icicle” (2024). Firm but breakable, the icicle’s existence will pass unnoticed, as one season changes into the next. What will remain is the photograph. And if not that, a digital image that one day may be retrieved.
