Lynn Saville Statement Panel

A Statement
from the Artist, Lynn Saville
I have been a roamer of limbo regions. These unloved and overlooked places are our last frontier. When I discover a site that attracts me, I return to it at dusk. In this liminal period, daylight gives way to moonlight and to the artificial light of streetlamps, advertisements, and surveillance.  Several years ago, I was lured back to the central areas of the city, where economic turmoil produced gaps in the urban façade—vacant stores whose glowing windows could resemble a Rothko painting. I began my series titled “Dark City” to pursue this contrast between aesthetic perception and the subtext of economic distress, a contrast that evoked a disquieting beauty. In effect, I was seeking to capture the ways in which urban places become spaces and vice versa. The photograph Abandoned Michigan Central Depot, Detroit, Michigan, for instance, shows a place that has become a looming shell of itself, a space.


Gradually, I became aware of a rhythm of transition in storefronts and empty lots that seemed to be part of an urban ecology and growth cycle. As the economy improved, shuttered stores were converted to new businesses. I came to appreciate that this process had its own iconography, whose symbols included the ladder and the broom. I also began to see how a scene first perceived as vacant had its own secret plenitude: a lively visual “conversation” among tools, abandoned objects, and reflections.


I captured such a conversation, for example, in Marginal Street, New York City. Looking into an empty restaurant at twilight, I was surprised to see what resembled an accidental art installation. The elements of this transient, random work included reflections of the New Jersey Palisades behind me, spectral highlights from a shiny doorframe, and a ladder positioned as if someone was ready to begin work on a rectangle of light.

The process of photographing empty storefronts—and, as I widened my focus, compromised ecosystems close to the city, like the Meadowlands in New Jersey; empty billboards, captured on the fly from trains and buses; untended lots; ghosted figures; and industrial sites—gave me an increasing sense of the richness of vacancy as a descriptor and a concept. It became for me not only a synonym for absence, but also a source of creative intrigue, in which signs of previous occupation, failure, and loss mingle with hints of renewal and re- creation. Such hints appear in Brooklyn Bridge Park Construction, taken on a restricted site where a park employee let me wander for an hour at twilight. I continue to photograph cities at dawn or dusk, transitional times that underscore the shifting and multivalent nature of empty but evolving urban spaces. In addition, I have been working in cities other than New York— for example, Los Angeles, Portland (Maine), Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Houston—so that the series has a more national scope.


Finally, I have come to realize that in this series neither a city’s iconic sites nor its goods are on display. This is perhaps unexpected, given that we often assume city’s purpose is display— of persons, commodities, architecture, and spectacles of all sorts. But for me, the dark city has been stripped of its agreed-upon attractions. It is an empty skeletal set in which objects can dream, and light and shadow can dance uninterrupted. 

Saville Panel 

Lynn Saville
Dark City, Urban America at Night
Lynn Saville’s Dark City photographs illustrate her exploration of urban America at twilight and dawn.  In this series, she focuses on evocative spaces that are generally devoid of people. Vacant buildings, shuttered storefronts, and empty streets are the ostensible subjects of her pictures, but the natural cycle of decay and rebirth in urban ecology is at the heart of each of her landscapes of downtowns after dark from New York to Los Angeles.

​As art critic Geoff Dyer notes in the handsome book that accompanies the show, “The vacancy is both spatial and temporal—and Dark City is full of it.”