Jane Alynn

Born in Portland, Oregon, Jane Alynn now lives in Anacortes, Washington. She began photographing seriously in 1984, studying the work of masters and taking workshops with gifted teachers. Among her awards she was selected in 2014 as a finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass, and received in 2013 a national Women in Photography Award. Her photographs are exhibited regularly and are collected in the New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, Pinhole Collection, in Santa Fe, New Mexico; in Western Washington University; and in private collections. Also a poet, she delights in the intersection of these sister arts. For over 30 years Jane has photographed the natural world—its light and shadow, beauty and mystery, delicacy and tenacity, life and decay. Recently, Alynn has been drawn to landscapes in transition and the traces left behind. These images are meant as metaphor for our ephemeral existence, reminders that what we think is fixed is bound to disappear. Alynn's work is deeply influenced by early 20th century pictorial photographers, with their subtle tonal and tactile aspects and impressionistic soft focus, often strikingly ambiguous, painterly and poetic, whose expressive aims were to convey a mood of dreaminess to stimulate the imagination. To create photographs that embodied the pictorialists’ vision, Jane fit her camera with a zone plate, a non-lens optical device that diffracts light, which softens the image and creates a glow or “halo,” infusing forms with a glint of the numinous. Used with high-grain film it introduces ambiguity and nudges the boundaries of abstraction, helping to shift perception toward a sensual experience and tempt the imagination to see beyond the literal. These images also permit her to express a sense of the fragile, fleeting, ethereal. "I love the mystery and dark beauty these lens-less images convey visually. And I love that I’m often surprised the prints reveal something that was not visible in the viewfinder."