Lisa Donneson Photography

You know the song! “I wanna wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.” (Music: John Kander, lyrics: Fred Ebb, singer: Frank Sinatra.)

New York was in a frenzy by Game 4 of the NBA championships: Down 29 points and won. Game 5: Redemption after 53 years. Parade: 2 million people.

I interviewed and photographed New Yorkers during tfinals and parade about 1) which team is better, 1973 or the current team; 2) why the Knicks won; and 3) what the Knicks' championship meant to them.

1) Which team is better, 1973 or the current team?

“The current team, for sure."

“I’ve been a Knicks fan for 50 years. 50 years! I still love Walt Frazier and Willis Reed.”

“If they win, then they’re as good. But I like Walt Frazier. He’s my man.”

"If you ask my father-in-law, he'd say 1973. But I like the current team because I know them. I also like 1993-94."

2)  Why did the Knicks win?

“Cause we believed."

“I think it was the pause at the end. The Spurs got tired and the Knicks kept going."

“New York spirit. I paid a lot to go to that game!”

"I think the Spurs choked a little bit at the end of the game."

“We’ve got an angel with us or something.”

“The Knicks are a team of destiny.”

“We got luck."

“OG Anunoby.”

“Cause they're dawgs, the greatest of all time. I’m thinking of naming my kids after them."

3) What the Knicks' championship mean to you?

“Winning. Tired of losing.”

"Everything. I've been a Knicks fan all my life.

“You know, I fell asleep during the third quarter of game 4, then woke up for the fourth quarter. So timing is everything.”

“We were waiting for a big win and they did it for us.”

“Everything. I’ve waited three decades for this.” “It’s his birthday.” “Happy Birthday!”

“Togetherness. Unity."

“Everything. Look around you. They brought love to the city."

“Shit. New York. New York. Everything."

This selection of images comes from a collaboration with a French fashion and art magazine, Double (@double_magazine). I worked with an amazing team — Ewa Kluczenko, Stylist (@eklucaenko), Fabrice Paineau, Editor-in-Chief (@fabricepaineau) and Jérémy Vitté, Art Director. The theme of Double’s Issue 51, Spring Summer 2026, is TRANSACTION.

We shot the images during bitterly cold weather in New York City and in very high heels.

This project was made during an intense period of contemplation and self-analysis. My intentions were to combat isolation and boredom, find humor, and push myself into new directions, both emotionally and technically.

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 composite images to make two into one. I played 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 I also used props to tell the stories – similar but different sunglasses to differentiate the characters, 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.

The double self-portraits are featured in “Irreversible Order,” published by Art Paper Editions in November 2025. Podcast interview with Brad Feuerhelm here: Nearest Truth #491

I have been exploring various aspects of composition and have become enamored with abstract formless shapes. I am intrigued by the way a simple object, through folding, lighting, reflecting, employing the rules of perspective, building, balancing and collaging, is magically transformed into a dramatic, sculptural object or a wholly different shape. Triangular binder clips become curves. Pentagons become booklets. The deeper character of these inanimate objects emerges as they are shapeshifted.

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 heartfelt 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.

The daily activities of cooking, cleaning, painting, making photobooks, working out, and managing finances are the inspiration for these collages and still lifes. With carefully planned compositions to absorb the viewer, use of lighting to create depth and shadows, specific color choices to build atmosphere and moods, and varied background textures to form a base to present the subjects, I draw the viewer into my domestic life in a dreamy and enigmatic way.

Honorable Mentions, 25th Edition of Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for Women Photographers, Abstract and Still Life category for the egg and art materials series.

Here, 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?

In this project, I told secrets to my flowers. Such as what it’s like to age.

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

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.

I have made a lot of self-portraits over the past several years and decided to change it up, making street portraits. I know what’s it’s like to be on the other side of the camera – wanting to accommodate and please the photographer and finding the courage to let my guard down. I can communicate this empathy and create trust, and people usually say, “yes,” when I ask if I can make a portrait of them.

I look for people with strong personalities or style to photograph on the street. I look for a spark in their eye, a gait that reflects where they come from, and a motor running inside them. I look for colors and textures in their outfits that will resonate in a photograph, and backgrounds that convey their habitat – trees, wall murals, street furniture, vehicles, other pedestrians in the distance. If I engage the subjects in a conversation, the portraits become deeper.

Sometimes I wait for a subject to walk into a photogenic setting. Other times, the subject suddenly appears, and I dart my eyes about for the best nearby setting for a background. I enjoy the encounters as well as the challenges of thinking and acting quickly.

Many thanks to FotoNostrum 26th Annual Julia Margaret Cameron and 22nd Annual Pollux Awards for the honorable mentions for this series. Thank you to Trieste Photo Days for including one of these images in their exhibition.

This series is an analytic, anxious and intense group 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.

There is a magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two sides of diptychs, both visually and psychologically. I used two opposing light sources to exaggerate the the push and pull.

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.

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.

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.

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 anthropomorphized, when bathed in a certain type of light.

Here, a meditation on my bathroom.

This project was made during the 2020 early voting season in the county where our outgoing president lived and a controversial presidential election was decided in 2000, too. 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 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 at the time was 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.

I enjoy creating triptychs to tell brief stories and create relationships. I look for connections and relationships in mood, movement, shapes, lines and tonality among the photos, regardless of the subject matter. 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.

This project explores how Brooklyn Heights braced 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 would rebuild 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