Art Sync: All the Dahlias in My Garden

Elizabeth Johnson: On your website, you introduce your current photo series All The Dahlias with a quote from William Faulkner:

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

What does this pinpoint in Dahlias?

Lydia Panas: The quote is from his novel Light in August. Faulkner was getting at the unconscious conflict between what we feel and what we know. Having gone through psychoanalysis, I came to understand how the repressed and painful memories stood in the way of my feeling good. I incorporate this kind of tension between conscious and unconscious feelings in my work. All The Dahlias is about the pleasure of understanding.

EJ: Faulkner seems to be weighing feeling/belief against mind/knowing. Is it vital that we "believe" your photos by entering their realism? What do you hope we will "know"? Is believing and knowing dahlia images a difficult task––and a good photographic challenge––since as symbols of beauty, they can be both shortcuts and/or spurs to further knowledge?

EJ: The eight prints for this show combine pine needles, reflective water, the blur or shine of the wheelbarrow, and a variety of fresh to dead dahlias. Reflected daylight is limited to very small areas. It seems that layering flowers in a "flatbed picture frame," like an abstract painter, gives you a great deal of creative control to create an internal, personal mood. Did you shoot at a particular time to get saturated color and the right mix of dreaminess and clarity? How did you control light? What technical controls were important for this work?

LP: The process does feel like abstract painting: working with composition, light, and color. I shot this series with a medium format digital camera. Generally, I work with a view camera and large format film. The digital aspect was effective here because I had to work quickly as time was short and I was watching the dahlias day by day, hour by hour as the light changed.

LP: I’ve been making portraits since the 1990s and at the moment I don’t feel challenged by portraiture; right now, I’m not sure I have something to add. A lot of portraiture and photography in general looks the same to me and I want to do something different. I have always been interested in connections, and with portraiture the most interesting part was the sustained intimacy with another person––the experience between us and subsequently, the viewer interaction. It’s different from viewing photography in general where you look “at” the subject.

Photographs tend to illustrate a mood or an idea but with some distance. Mine are interactive. When observed closely, a strange discomfort creeps in. A mystifying shift of power from viewer to subject. They commonly leave viewers unsettled about what they have just seen and felt. It mimics the discomfort I felt as a child, when I should have felt love. I think that is their power. With the still lifes and the florals, the complexity and edginess are still apparent but there is more of a distance since viewers are not confronted with the intimacy of a face.

I turned to still life during the pandemic, when there were no models around, and I found a different kind of emotional satisfaction.

LP: I don’t think of this work as being more subjective than the portraits, just a different subject matter. I connect the same way. I experience the same intensity, trying to wrest something super personal from the scene just like I do when working with people, always attempting to say something in my own language. As a bilingual and very visual kid with a confusing childhood, I didn’t feel like either language (Greek or English) was mine. Part of becoming an artist was to look for a language I could identify with. A language that made sense to me and expressed what I was feeling. I found it in speaking through my camera.

I am excited by how this project turned out: abundant and luscious. It happened fluidly and was pleasurable to make. Interestingly, viewers often remark on the parallel threads that run through my different projects and how despite the varied subject matter they are recognizable as mine.

EJ: In previous works you have presented women as embodying their own power. Is Dahlias about the personal empowerment of confronting mortality?

LP: It’s about leaving behind the dark stuff that impedes personal empowerment. Earlier projects were about the patience, the hard work, the process that led to this place of lightness and strength and joy that I never felt before.

EJ: Robert Mapplethorpe's flower photos are erotically charged through association with his nudes and blunt sex portraits. I sense that you consider your previous portraits to be both erotically charged and empowering. I’m curious how you define "erotic"; I’m thinking of it as opposite of Thanatos.

If you believe your portraits are erotic, does All The Dahlias leverage their erotic charge to counter decay and death?

Lydia Panas: All The Dahlias | February 21 - March 22, 2025

Lydia Panas is a visual artist working with photography and video. A first-generation American, she was raised between Greece and the United States. Panas’ work investigates identity and what lies beneath the surface, exploring the tensions between presence, memory, and emotional depth. Her images are made in the fields, forests, and studio of her family farm in Pennsylvania, a landscape that deeply informs her artistic vision.

Panas' work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally and is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, among others. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Photo District News, among others. She has received numerous awards, including repeat invitations to the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize Exhibit, the Top Fifty Winner for Critical Mass, and two nominations for the Prix Pictet. Panas has held artist residencies at MASS MoCA and the Banff Centre for the Arts and has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

She holds degrees from Boston College, the School of Visual Arts, and New York University and has published three monographs: The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag 2012), Falling from Grace (Conveyor Arts 2016), and Sleeping Beauty (MW Editions 2021). She divides her time between a farm in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and New York City.