Linn Underhill lives in upstate New York and teaches photography at Colgate University. She has received two NEA Visual Artist Fellowships, a NYFA Photographers’ Fellowship, a NYSCA publishing grant for the publication of her book Thirty Five Years/One Week, and a NYFA Catalog Grant. Her work has been seen in one-person shows at the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ; Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA; Carleton College, Northfield, MN; the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY; and CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY. It was recently included in Deviant Bodies II at CEPA. Her work is published in Photography: A Cultural History by Mary Warner Marien, 2002; Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History by Harmony Hammond, 2000; The Passionate Camera: Photography and the Bodies of Desire edited by Deborah Bright, 1998; and Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies edited by Diane Neumaier, 1995. It is included in several private and institutional collections, including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. She holds a MFA degree from SUNY at Buffalo and the Visual Studies Workshop.
Statement:
“No-man’s land” is defined as an “area of unowned, unclaimed, or uninhabited land”; or, in war, “an area in a theatre of operations not controlled by either side.” I propose gender as such a field, open to question and contention, owned absolutely by no one.
The glamorous portraits taken from the 1930’s to the 1950’s by the gay photographer, George Platt Lynes, inspire this body of work. Lynes was best known for his fashion and dance photographs, but he also made elegant portraits of his friends and boyfriends. These included many of the heroes of my youth: artists and writers like E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Isamu Noguchi, Christopher Isherwood, Aaron Copland, Tennessee Williams and Lincoln Kirstein. Lynes invests these portraits with a sensual softness that is homoerotic and opens up to question contemporary gender stereotypes. These men appear to be solidly invested with their own privileged place in the world, and at the same time are passive objects of an eroticizing gaze. It is this ambiguity that I am drawn to.
The look of that glamour is particular to the forties and fifties -- the cut of the clothes, the style of hair, the look of a pretty face, as well as the mannerisms of pose and lighting, props and space. My series of portraits and self-portraits in “DRAB” (dressed as a boy), some of which directly mimic portraits by Lynes, try to recreate the look of male privilege and glamour of that period. They also afford me the unique opportunity to validate my aging female body in an exhilarating act of masquerade.
Isabel Allende describes California as a “no-man’s land”. “You can go there and become somebody else,” she told an interviewer. A native of California myself, I had to leave it to achieve that freedom. Raised in an old California family that prescribed who I should become, I took Allende’s spirit of adventure with me when I took my leave.