Lisa Donneson Photography

Many thanks to Fotonostrum for giving an Honorable Mention to this series as part of the Julia Margaret Cameron awards, PhotoPlace Gallery for including an image from this series in its exhibition, “Portraits: Self and Others,” to A. Smith Gallery and Ludington Center for the Arts for including an image from this series in its exhibition and accompanying book, and to "Outside the Box", and to Self Portraits on Fire for a solo online show.

“Which Hand?” is an analytic, anxious and intense series of self-portraits. The headless characters are not identifiable, so the viewer can more easily access themselves in the images.The diptychs and triptychs interplay different gestures and shapes of the body. Color combinations and props further emphasize and distinguish the relationships between the images, and emphasize mood, atmosphere, and tension. Building a series of self-portraits allows me to find humor in psychological, social, and emotional traumas.

There is a magnetic attraction and repulsion, between the two sides of the diptychs, both visually and psychologically. I used two opposing light sources to exaggerate the shape of the high heels that lift the figures from the ground.

 The triptychs tell mini-stories through a central image flanked by two supporting frames, causal relationships, the passage or stoppage of time, or by showing three sides to an argument.

There are some benefits to aging – your metro card automatically recharges, you become the matriarch (or patriarch) of your family, you have a vast collection of cultural reference points from all those years of living, you’ve had time to deepen relationships, you now have time to indulge in things that you previously had no time for, and nobody cares what you look like when you dance.

The other side of the coin is that you must confront your vulnerabilities and take more precautions, attend to more frequent medical procedures, and face your own and your relatives’ mortality.

My advice: continue striving for balance, strength and endurance, keep the romance burning, and don’t fall behind on technology.

I’m having a dialogue with my lamp, an inanimate object whose spirit I have animated through lighting, color and text. I try to get a reaction from the lamp, and at other times, the lamp rattles me for a reaction. We play and dance around various subjects, perhaps even play a game, passionately and aggressively.

I experimented with different linguistic registers for our conversation – frozen, formal, consultative, casual, and intimate, and settled on the last two, to emphasize closeness and mutual understanding. The sequence of photographs begins with a strange, dark, night-time palette, and progresses to a tango of saturated colors, turning up the possibilities of Photoshop.

The project began when I photographed the lamp in different angles and colors of light, which revealed different personalities. Next, I treated the lamp as a solo character wearing a hat (the lampshade). I experimented, giving the voice to myself only, then to the lamp only, and found that a dialogue worked best. The lamp and I hear everything, but what did the lamp hear when I wasn’t present?

For a few months, it looked as if we were pre-post-pandemic…until Omicron swept over New York City. I moved back to Brooklyn and had more time alone. My husband returned to his office, our daughters moved back to their apartments, I sold my late mother’s home, and I reclaimed my territory in the city.

When the masks came off, I returned to a hair salon, had my hair colored with the expensive stuff, got a mani-pedi, and dressed in nice clothes again. Then I got timed-tickets to all the major museums, caught up on the latest shows, revisited favorite works of art that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I went to the ballet and the theatre. I returned to my local grocery store and chatted with the owner, who was relieved to see his customers returning. My husband and I went back to a neighborhood restaurant, where the chef gave us fist bumps. I realized how much I missed people and smiling at them. All the fun stuff.

I met several Zoom photography and art classmates in person. It felt very awkward, as if these new friends had popped out of the computer screen onto the city streets to play with me.

Building a series of self-portraits allowed me to visit the self and find humor in the psychological, social, and emotional traumas of the prior three years. I delved into self-portraits from multiple points of view — pictures within pictures, photos superimposed onto collages, diptychs combining portraits and still lifes, composite images where I talked to my “twin” self. and portraits where I re-engaged in my former life and “normalcy.”

This project is a series of self-portraits that I made during the Covid lockdown. My intentions were to converse with my inner self, heal my heart after the death of relatives, touch memories, record daily life, combat isolation and boredom, find humor, and push myself into new directions, both emotionally and technically. I was visually exploring ways to tell brief stories and present an alter ego.

Emotionally, I explored my gazes, gestures, postures, and expressions – as a clear-eyed participant in the photographic process, as a subject posing for a photographer, and as characters observed from the other side of the lens. I played with plausible deniability – do I have a twin; are both characters me?

Technically, I worked with single images, composite images, diptychs, and triptychs to present a moment or a series of moments during the pandemic. I also worked with color combinations – dressing in either monochromatic colors or complementary colors to emphasize relationships, differentiate one alter-ego from another, and to create mood, atmosphere, and tension and . I also used props to help tell the stories – similar but different sunglasses to differentiate the characters, a sanitized package to reflect the fear of touching anything that came from beyond the home and hearth, food and coffee to reflect the desire to hang out with others beyond the Zoom screen, or unseen high heel shoes versus a shoeless character to create characters of different heights.

As I look back at the images, the results are spooky and visceral. I feel the isolation and longing for human interaction that began with the lockdown in March 2020. I feel the resignation and adaptation to the highly isolated way of life, season after season. I feel the desire and relief to remove the masks and get back together.

This project is about my relationship with the flowers, herbs, foliage, pods, and branches that grow in my garden or nearby my home and the circle of life that they represent as life springs from the ground in the warm weather and falls from the trees in the cool weather.

When I pick flowers in the Spring or Summer, they do not die, but are transported to a new, brief life inside a supporting vase and water. In the Fall and Winter, there is an ugly beauty inherent in the dead, brown pods when they are brought indoors and enveloped in luxurious colors. They unite and share poignancy, intimacy and nostalgia.

This project is a combination of self-portraits, interiors, still-lifes and composites about solitude, quiet and pleasure inside my domestic space. My home is special to me; curating and refining it has been a family value for decades. It reflects who I am, who I’ve been, where I am and where I want to be. Here, the still life becomes a self-portrait.

There is a strong presence and absence of light and shadows inside my home as the day progresses. The sun asserts itself in the morning through the kitchen window from the south-east during the winter and from the northeast during the summer. I get out of bed early to greet the sun. It is neutral at mid-day. Then it illuminates and reddens my living room during the afternoon and early evening. I accompany the sun inside my home, from east to west.

I have been creating triptychs over the past year to tell brief stories an create relationships. I made them by analyzing colors and moods of a few hundred photos that I made this year and over the past few years. I spread thumbnails of the individual photographs all over the floor and table, looked for connections and relationships in mood, movement, shapes, lines and tonality among the photos, then assembled the triptychs. The images enhance, enrich and talk to each other, much like a chamber ensemble, making them more complex and deeper than solos or duets. I play piano-violin-cello trios and have a heightened awareness of this combination of forces.

When we moved to our house in Sagaponack thirty years ago, our locust tree was young and unimpressive. Now, its crown embraces the house from above the chimney. There’s a root system underground as big as the tree, and some of its roots burst above ground, too. The tree’s longest branch reaches all the way across the yard to the garden as if it wants to converse with the trees on the other side.

I worry about that long branch, its fragility, and keep it supported with a thin cables. But when I walk up the driveway, I see that the tree is muscular and powerful in every direction and integral to our home. It grew up with our family and became our protector, our guardian.

This project is about the 2020 early voting season in the county where our outgoing president lives and a controversial presidential election was decided in 2000. My intention was to make the early voting season come alive. My husband was called to work in Palm Beach County, Florida, so I took the opportunity to photograph the landscape and the people who inhabit it. I visually explored the tropical weather, coastal vegetation, inland muck and political passions. I connected with people on both sides of the aisle and tried to portray each individual with dignity, regardless of whether I agreed or disagreed with their political positions.

President Donald J. Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago, is in Palm Beach County. Florida is a bellwether state (35% Republican, 37% Democrat, 27% independent or other party) and is infamous for Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court ordered the cessation of Florida’s vote recount, which led to George W. Bush’s 2020 victory. Florida was also in the spotlight because of past problems with butterfly and punch-card ballot problems (a confusing layout and difficulties with punching through the ballots resulted in unintentional votes).

The 2020 Presidential race in Palm Beach County came in at 56% for Biden and 43% for Trump, although Trump won Florida. There were also four congressional elections, as well as numerous state and county offices on the county ballot. The vote was heavy, with overall voter turnout of about 77%, but not the all-time high turnout (which was set in 1992 at 80+%). The four congressional seats were all held by the incumbents (three Democrats and one Republican).

It was hot and humid in Palm Beach County during the early voting season. Floridians felt the pressure of being in the spotlight, and this story is told through portraits, landscapes and signs. I focused on the glare, gazes, gestures, two-hour waits to vote, cheering, booing, hope, excitement, turmoil and anxiety of Palm Beach County residents. I photographed people of different ages, races and socio-economic groups throughout the county. These themes carry on in the landscapes through heavy rain and wind tossing the palm trees about, the heavy weight of Spanish Moss, navigating through the Intracoastal Waterway, and side-by-side opposing ecosystems.

This project explores how life exists now in Brooklyn Heights and how the neighborhood is bracing for lengthy repairs on a deteriorating highway and a cherished park that is stacked on top of the cantilevered highway. When the Department of Transportation proposed a "Promenade Highway" while it rebuilds the BQE, public outcry was so intense that Mayor De Blasio formed an Expert Panel to examine DOT's assumptions. This spiraled into a series of political, engineering and social challenges.

Official Selection, New York World Film Festival 2020

Official Selection, New York Lift-Off Film Festival 2020

Official Selection, Better Cities Film Festival 2020

Click here to see the movie: Triple Cantilevers: Grinding to a Halt

There is a quietness and feeling of nostalgia in my Brooklyn home now that my children have grown. I see stillness in a vase of lilies, solitude in a sponge sitting in the corner of the bathtub, and calmness in a sink slowly filling with bubbles. 

I recently walked into my Brooklyn bathroom, was struck by the morning light that filled room and took a picture. When I saw the results, I was amazed that something as banal as a toilet or a towel could become poetic, even anthropomorphised, when bathed in a certain type of light.

Here, a meditation on my bathroom.

The full book is 7x7 inches and features 20 images.