The primary focus of Lynn Stern’s black-and-white film photography is luminosity, a fascination unchanged throughout a 47-year photographic career. Stern (b. 1942) uses exclusively natural, indirect light, making it the subject of her images rather than the means by which to illuminate. Since 1985, Stern has been using a translucent scrim to create a quality of light that is immaterial and filled with energy. She has been working with abstraction for decades, sometimes using the scrim alone to create completely non-objective images, and sometimes combining it with glass objects that merge with the fabric; in these images, the objects are not important as subject matter, instead becoming elements within a composition of light and ambiguous space.

As the daughter of the late David M. Solinger (art collector and former Whitney Museum president), Stern grew up surrounded by an extensive collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings and sculptures. Her later influences would include photographers Edward Weston and Paul Caponigro and painters of the 19th-century Luminist movement. (It was Paul Caponigro who wrote the forward to her book, Unveilings (Smith College Museum of Art (January 1, 1988).)

Lynn Stern has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and her photographs are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University (Ithaca); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Portland Art Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum (London); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); and the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), among others. The Lynn Stern archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ.