Lynn Davis

Lynn Davis is known for her inspiring large scale black and white photographs of natural landscapes and monuments of culture and architecture. She has been the recipient of such awards as the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Richard Crowley Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation.

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she studied at the University of Colorado and at the University of Minnesota. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970, and in 1974 she began her career as an apprentice to Bernice Abbott.

Davis's first exhibition came in 1979 at the International Center of Photography in New York alongside her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe. After her first trip to Greenland in 1986 she gave up photographing the human form, shifting her lens toward monumental landscapes and cultural/architectural icons for which she is renowned. Davis has since documented the pyramids of Egypt, ancient architectural ruins in Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, India, Italy, and the Middle East, as well as natural wonders, including the Grand Geyser in Yellowstone and Wave Rock in Australia.

Davis's photographs have been exhibited internationally and collected widely. Her work appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the J. Paul Getty Museum which held an exhibition of Davis's prints in 1999. Ms. Davis has also received several commissions from public and private institutions such as the Lannan Foundation, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and the Nature Conservancy.