Jocelyn Lee

Born in 1962 in Naples (Italy)
Lives and works between New York and Maine (USA)

Jocelyn Lee received her BA in philosophy and visual arts from Yale University, and her MFA in photography from Hunter College. In 2013 she received a NYFA Fellowship, and in 2001 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Jocelyn Lee’s first monograph Nowhere But Here was published by Steidl Publishers in December 2010 with a forward by Sharon Olds. In 1996 her work The Youngest Parents was published by DoubleTake Books and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in collaboration with Robert Coles and John Moses. Her works are in the collections of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France; The Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; The Yale Museum of Art, New Haven, CT; The List Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; The Portland Museum of Art; Portland, ME; The Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; The Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; The Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, NC; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Bates College Museum of Art. Lewiston, ME; and The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockport, ME; as well as numerous private collections. She is represented by Pace MacGill Gallery in New York and Flatlands Gallery in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Lee taught photography at Princeton University from 2003-2012 and at The Maine College of Art from 1993-2001. She has been a visiting artist at Yale University, Bowdoin College, Mass College of Art, and New York University.

Jocelyn Lee has submitted photographs from her series Last Light for KB17. The artist writes: “I’ve always used photography as a way to forcibly slow the events of my life. While my mother was dying of lung cancer, I compulsively made thousands of images with three kinds of cameras at every possible increment of time, from split-second to hour-long exposures. As long as my mother was still breathing, I felt the world urgently required my record. Using a medium-format camera, I photographed my mother, her home, our family and friends. With a primitive box camera, I made color pinhole photographs of the landscape around us: my mother’s garden, the view from her hospital room, the fields and yards of neighbors. In the low-light environment of the hospital, I used a digital camera. Together, these images are a meditation on love, the beauty of the physical world, and the transience of both. As my mother struggled to breathe, I made long exposures of the last foxglove, dogwood and delphinium to bloom during her life. I watched the heavy-headed peonies outside her bedroom window flower, ignorant of her pain, and then drop, petal by petal, day by day, to the ground. I took a pinhole photograph of white phlox blowing in the wind during the final hour of her life.”