Welcome to The Salon
By Janelle Lynch
September 2023
Published in Welcome to The Salon
Tonal Editions, Manchester, VT, 2023
The Salon was born in 2015 in response to a request from former students. They had just finished their formal studies with me at the International Center of Photography and were seeking an environment to continue discussions about photography and their creative practices. A small group of us met weekly in my Long Island City studio for years. I served wine, tea, and macaroons.
In January 2021, after a hiatus, I resumed a virtual salon. I invited photographers with whom I had had a relationship as a teacher or mentor to join. Still in the midst of the global pandemic, we oriented our attention toward nurturing our creative lives for three hours, once per week. Ongoing today, we convene for meaningful discussion about photography, the creative process, related texts, artistic and cultural references, and for constructive feedback about our work. Guest artists join us monthly. The images in this book are a selection of what The Salon members made during the year.
Louise Bourgeois’ Sunday Salon was my inspiration for creating my own. Weekly, for three decades, she hosted artists, writers, and curators in her Chelsea townhouse. The roots of the salon as a gathering place for social and intellectual exchange, however, reach back to Renaissance Rome. They spread from Italy to France and then throughout Europe, and were hosted by prominent, educated women—salonnières—in private homes. Like The Salon today, they were curated evenings of art and literature with the intention to learn from, speak and listen to fellow participants.
In my welcome letter to members dated January 3, 2021, I mused on the different uses of the word “salon”—including, a room in a home. The letter began, “While thinking about the milieu I would like to create for our time together, I imagined a space broader than a room. Rather, a home.”
The letter continued,
When the anthropologist Mary Bateson was asked what the word ‘homemaking’ means to her, she replied, ‘Well, creating an environment in which learning is possible. And that is what a home is. I mean, that is what we want the homes that we give to our children to be—places where they grow in many, many different ways. They learn how to connect with other people. They learn how to care for others. They learn particular skills. They learn their own capacities and how to trust other people and how to trust themselves. They learn what respect is.’ While you are not my ‘children’—indeed, we are peers—I would like to establish a similar kind of space here for the discussion of our work and our creative lives.
With that aim, and in the spirit of looking ahead to a year of possibility, I sketched a framework for The Salon centered around themes of growth, reflection, wonder, and discovery. I shared Marie Howe’s poem, “Singularity,” which considers the notions of home and belonging and, at the same time, encourages broadmindedness, imagination, and embrace of the unknown—critical elements of our creative practices. And lives. The last line of it reads,
“All everything home”
Other tenets of The Salon emerged as time passed and our kinship strengthened: a fundamental belief in unyielding support and encouragement; a veneration for personal vision guided by instinct; an unabashed reverence for beauty; an embrace of play as essential to the creative process; and a regard for sincerity and authenticity.
The authors we read, including Robert Adams and Rainer Maria Rilke, supported The Salon’s philosophical foundation, and the members’ creative processes and conceptual inquiries. In Rilke’s first letter to the young poet, he writes, “And like a first human, try to say what you see and experience and love and lose. No love poems; avoid the customary forms….Portray your sorrows and daydreams, your passing thoughts and beliefs stirred by a glimpse of beauty. Describe it all with a quiet, humble honesty….”
The Salon members, Chloe Jones, Irina Anisimova-Chaiet, and Andrew Rizzardi returned home to their birthplaces––Arkansas, Moscow, western Pennsylvania––fertile ground that bore images that explore love, loss, and longing. Jones’ pictures are informed by Southern literature, folktales, and her interest in the relationship between her body and the natural world. Anisimova-Chaiet’s are informed by family history, memory, and belonging. And Rizzardi’s images explore fantasy, mortality, and personal history as they relate to sense of self and the passage of time.
In Art Can Help, Robert Adams asserts, “More than anything else, beauty is what distinguishes art. Beauty is never less than a mystery, but it has within it a promise.”
Beauty, mystery, and promise are all revealed in Pamela Fox’s and Tom Klem’s images. From home, the artists create imaginary spaces and draw inspiration from the heavens. My own work is in parallel with theirs. Fox’s images explore the grace and ethereality inherent in nature, and the hope therein. Klem’s work explores visual perception and is informed by his life as a sculptor and magician. And my work explores transcendence and searches for the connection between the material and spiritual worlds.
Anastasia Davis also creates imaginary spaces by repurposing previously disregarded images, assembling them, and rephotographing them. She is interested in sensory and emotional experience before it is translated into meaning, and all that lies between perception and interpretation.
Lee Isles and Michael Wilson draw upon the natural world as a vehicle for their creative investigations. Near his Vermont home, Isles uses a long-ago deserted nature preserve as a setting to explore themes of abandonment and the metaphysical. Following Adams’ footsteps, he also considers the shapeshifting influence inhabitants have had on the land. Also like Adams, Wilson, at home in Montana, celebrates nature and the coherence and structure that underlie it, and life.
While I am not a homemaker in the traditional sense of the word, I humbly—and proudly—assume the identity thereof as defined by Bateson. What has transpired within The Salon, and as a result of it, is due to the participation of each member and the camaraderie we’ve developed. Together we’ve learned, we’ve grown personally, we’ve evolved as artists, thinkers, and as contributors to the visual world. And, we’ve become family.