By Jean Dykstra April 10, 2025
The 15 photographs in Judy Linn’s modest but pitch-perfect show at Kerry Schuss Gallery cover a lot of ground: they range in date from 1969 to 2024, and her subjects vary widely – landscapes, interiors, street scenes and a couple of portraits (of a girl, and a cow). The connecting thread is the artist’s close looking and her deep appreciation of things that have little obvious import. “Style is not what you shoot,” she told Art in America in 2020, “but how clearly you depict what is there.”
During the pandemic, Linn went back through her archive, making black-and-white pigment prints of decades of negatives. Several are printed off-center, leaving a large white space along the top or the side; others retain their black borders. Unframed, and pinned unassumingly to the wall, her photographs reliably appear more straightforward than they are.
Judy Linn may be best known for the portraits she made of her friend Patti Smith – along with Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, and others – in the early 1970s in New York City (more than 100 of which were included in the 2011 book Patti Smith, 1969-1976, Photographs by Judy Linn, published by Abrams). But the first Judy Linn image I remember seeing was not of Smith and her bohemian circle but rather a closely cropped image of an anthropomorphic pile of frozen, dirty snow sitting on a storm drain, a straw sticking straight up out of its center. ‘Slurpy’ 2011 (not on view here), is a delightfully deadpan image, made by someone with a bone-dry sense of humor that weaves its way through this show as well.
The images on view until May10 translate the world through Linn’s roving eye, ever-alert to the possibility of a moment of beauty, or geometry, or low-key comedy. ‘Level’ 2022, has a little of all three. It shows 17 differently sized levels laid out side-by-side on a damp sidewalk. The particular shapes common to nearly all versions of a level point to the quirkiness of industrial design, while also suggesting, somehow, a surrealist composite of surprised faces. The fragment of a parked car at the top of the image gestures to a rich history of street photography, bringing to mind ‘Girl Playing under Green Car, New York’ ca. 1980, by Linn’s friend Helen Levitt.
Linn was visiting Levitt in upstate New York when she made ‘Happy Car’1995. The bucolic landscape seems to be collapsing in on itself, a fallen tree branch having landed on a wire, pulling a telephone pole in toward the street, the car in question skirting disaster. Like her 2002 photograph ‘Tilted House’, ‘Happy Car’ suggests that the ground we stand on is not so solid, nor so level, as we think.
Linn has shot in color, but the photographs here are all black and white, or more specifically, a spectrum of greys. ‘Bedroom Window’1999, shows the view from her bedroom in upstate New York – a tangle of bare tree branches so thick they flatten the picture plane, bisected by one pale, solid tree trunk right in the middle of the frame, and in the midst of all of the straight lines, a single tree that arches flamboyantly backwards. People are scarce in these pictures, except for one of a girl in a rumpled plaid shirt, lying in the grass and gazing into the middle distance. The only other “portrait” is of a pretty spotted cow at the edge of a field, reflected in the still water in front of it. Without romanticizing her subject, Linn regards this solitary creature with straightforward appreciation, a little reminiscent of one of Peter Hujar’s animal portraits.
Linn also has an eye for ruins and broken things, like a house slowly disintegrating or a disassembled glass lampshade hanging near some wire hangers. Drawn to textures and the play of light over surfaces, Linn takes notice of the smooth or beveled glass, the beaded seams, the crown-shaped opening at the top. It’s a little out of fashion and a little forlorn, but in Linn’s photograph, redeemed.
Jean Dykstra is an editor and critic and has contributed recently to the New York Review of Books, Dear Dave, magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. She was the editor of photographmagazine from 2013-2024.
JUDY LINN "Cal 13" 2008. Courtesy Kerry Schuss Gallery.
JUDY LINN "Cow" 2003. Courtesy Kerry Schuss Gallery.
JUDY LINN "Happy Car" 1995. Courtesy Kerry Schuss Gallery.
JUDY LINN "Lampshade" 1972. Courtesy Kerry Schuss Gallery.
JUDY LINN "Level" 2022. Courtesy Kerry Schuss Gallery.