Almost fifty years separate these two photographs, yet the setting is the same, the same room, the same sofa, the same woman.
When Lynn Gilbert first photographed Denise Scott Brown in the 1970s, she captured the quiet force of a brilliant architect fighting to be seen in a field that looked away. Five decades later, Gilbert returned to document a legend.
Together the portraits took on a life of their own: traveling to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. Now these portraits are being woven into a documentary: the story of Denise and Lynn, two lives separated by time and place, brought together in an extraordinary way half a century later.
Two women, two careers, and one sofa, a story that is still unfolding.
A Portrait Twice Told
LYNN GILBERT
I am a photographer who documents areas of society that have not been recorded before. In the 1970s, I took environmental portraits of children from more than a hundred families in New York City from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
One of my significant contributions has been documenting the key trailblazers from the second wave of the women’s movement. In 1981, I published their portraits and their stories in their own words in my book “Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped Our Times.”
I also documented the interiors of traditional houses in Turkey, which are a significant part of their cultural heritage. They were published in "The Silk Road: Then and Now."
Recently, I’ve documented the transformation of a private garden through the seasons.
My work has been widely exhibited and published, with portraits in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, and New York Historical Society. It has also appeared on various media platforms more than 1,000 times, including Netflix, Nvidia, Intel, National Geographic, MoMA, the British Museum, and The Washington Post.
