Lynn Alleva Lilley – The Nest

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Lynn Alleva Lilley’s photobook The Nest rewards careful as well as casual looking. A finely observed and lovingly chronicled portrait of the woods near her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 98 photographs it builds up overlapping layers of detail, form, relationship, and metaphorical resonance.

Like the photographs of other artists who trust their images to speak for themselves, Lilley’s photographs show rather than explain.

On one level they are an inventory of what she has seen in the nearby woods:

birds (duck, goose, dove, robin, cardinal, vulture, heron, owl, woodpecker)
bugs (spider, caterpillar, butterfly, cicada)
animals (deer, fish, crawfish, turtle, snake, frog)
seasons and weather (ice, snow, rain, mist, heat, thunderstorm, cold)
times of day (morning, afternoon, evening, night)
traces of people (road, forest playhouse, fishing lure, stone pile, rope around a tree trunk, path, board, fence, concrete bridge foundation, pet gravesite)
stages of life (broken egg, hatchling fish, crawfish carcass, deer bones)
and a rich palette of textures and colors (tender spring greens, snowy winter greys and whites, fall oranges and yellows).

On another level Lilley’s photographs suggest that these woods are a nest, a nurturing home for its inhabitants – plants, animals, and people. There are several photographs of bird nests that echo the book’s title, but there are also occasional pictures taken not in the woods but inside a house – a view of fall foliage through a window, someone’s neck and shoulder, a bird flying against an inside window. What to make of them, these anomalies? Considered in the flow of the visual narrative, their purpose may be to remind us of our connection to the natural world and of our place in the cycle of life.

The Nest is organized into eight sections or chapters, each a book signature separated from the others by two blank black pages. Photographs are mostly portrait layouts one photo to a page interspersed with double-page spreads, blank pages, and a small number of half page landscape layouts. Several sections are clearly organized around a theme (views of the water, cold weather) and the varied sequencing sustains the viewer’s interest throughout the book.

Lilley shows a good deal of imagination in terms of the things she looks at and how she turns them into images, and she takes chances with some images that earn their place in the book based on their colors, textures, and relationships to other photos rather than on any clearly resolved subject. Her eye for forest life is especially keen, and one wonders in particular at the patience she must have needed to get so close to the deer, who are not shown bounding away but who seemingly accept her presence.

My favorite photos are of water in the creek. Lilley includes a number of underwater views that add variety and a unique perspective to the ensemble. And in several you see colors and patterns and shadows under the water and on the surface mixed in with reflections of sky and trees above. Stunning, and wonderful examples of the camera’s ability to see.

As is the case with other great photobooks, you can come back to The Nest again and again. Open its pages and enter its world. Turn them and experience it.

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The PhotoBook Journal previously featured reviews of Tender Mint and Deep Time.

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Hans Hickerson is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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The Nest, Lynn Alleva Lilley

Photographer: Lynn Alleva Lilley (born in Washington DC; resides in Maryland)

Text: Lynn Alleva Lilley, poetry by Jane Hirshfield

Softcover, stitched binding; 160 pages with 98 color images; 21 x 28.5 cm; printed in Belgium, bound in the Netherlands; ISBN 978-90-833571-1-9

Designer: Rob van Hoesel

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