White Room: Judy Linn

White Columns is proud to present an exhibition by Judy Linn. One thing is clear: we don’t see enough of Judy Linn’s work. Widely known for her early images of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith (Linn’s iconic photographs grace the cover of Smith’s 1972 book ‘Seventh Heaven’ and her 1976 album ‘Radio Ethiopia’), Linn remains a mercurial figure in the New York art world. Her photographs, which deftly avoid categorization, have, for more than three decades, described a world that exists just beyond our rational everyday. Linn’s approach and sensibility, which often seems closer to that of a painter or poet, is startlingly idiosyncratic: her images are possessed by an extraordinary economy, wit and intelligence. Focusing on seemingly mundane aspects of the social landscape – e.g. a tattoo on a man’s back, objects in a museum display, an image of an actor on a television screen, etc. – Linn’s photographs privilege and celebrate the incidental, the peripheral, the marginal, the overlooked, and the neglected. For her White Room exhibition Linn will present a discrete group of images produced over the past thirty years.