1962, Naples, Italy
Throughout her career American photographer Jocelyn Lee has explored full length portraits of seemingly unposed, even indifferent subjects. Her beguiling portraits secure not so much an individual likeness but an emblematic presence. Lee borrows from the formal conventions of painting, lending a certain temporal permanence to her subjects while maintaining the potency of the open ended photographic narrative. (source: Art New England, Diana Gaston). Manoeuvring back and forth between levels of intimacy and unease, Lee also purposely looks for spaces that are not to distracting, to encourage the viewer to focus on the individual and psychological exchange of the portrait for pertinent clues. When she makes the picture, Lee prefers to wait for the moment when her subjects 'breath their own life into the room' and are no longer aware of the camera. Yet for all their transparency and brilliant details, her subjects, their stories, remain unknown, deftly eclipsing the camera's attempts to capture them.

In addition to portraiture Lee trains her camera in landscape and interior photography. Consistent in her work is a focus on the visual and tactile qualities of the material world, emphasizing the chromatic and textural richness of flesh, fabrics, and foliage. Her fascination with the physical and psychological transitions of people has produced incisive portraits that capture the fraught passage from adolescence to adulthood, as well as the changes that aging registers on the face and body.


Jocelyn Lee (b. 1962, Naples, Italy) received a BA from Yale University in 1986 and an MFA in Photography from the City University of New York at Hunter College in 1992. Beginning in 1990, American photographer Jocelyn Lee spent six years living with teenage mothers and fathers in Texas and Maine to document this social phenomenon as honest as she could. The result was a powerful record which she gave the title: The Youngest Parents: Teenage Pregnancy as it Shapes Lives (1997). Lee found herself in the documentary tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus. Lee lives and works in Princeton, N.J., and Cape Elizabeth, Maine and lectures photography at Princeton University.


Grants
Guggenheim Fellowship (2001).

selected collections:
Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
Colby College Museum of Fine Art
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine
Folkwang Museum
List Center for the Visual Arts, MIT, Cambridge, Mass
Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Yale University Art Gallery

Publications:
Nowhere but Here, published by Steidl & Partners, January 2011

2014
Dark Blue: the water as protagonist, Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee

2013
About face: contemporary portraiture, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
The kids are all right, John Michael Kohler Arts Centre, Sheboygan (Wisconsin)

2012
Megacool, Künstlerhaus k/haus, Vienna, Austria

2010
Nowhere but here, Pace/ MacGill, New York (solo)

2009
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

2008
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA

2007
Center for Maine Contemporary Art

2006
University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor (solo)

2005
Stone Hill College, Easton, Mass.

2003
University of Maine at Farmington (solo)
Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine

2001
Portland Museum of Art, Maine

2000
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine

1997
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Durham, N.C. (solo)

1995
Maine College of Art, Portland (solo)

1994
Houston Center for Photography