The Salon: Celebrating 10 Years
Janelle Lynch reflects on a decade of collective imagemaking
The end of the year is a time for reflection, considering projects achieved and new directions for creative exploration. I’m doing that in my world, and I imagine some of you are, too. Earlier this year, photographer Janelle Lynch emailed to say she was celebrating ten years of The Salon, a photography community she hosts from her home in New York. Creative community connections are close to my heart, so I invited Janelle to write about her experience. Some of you may recall her excellent essay, “How to make a good photograph,” published here in May 2025, which is one of my favorite pieces this year. Janelle is a soulful, empathetic imagemaker, and I admire the work she does to cultivate and create connections in The Salon. If you aren’t yet familiar with this group, now’s the time. Enjoy! — AA
The Salon is an international community of thirty imagemakers. Over the last decade, I have grown it using the fundamental elements, beliefs, and attitudes I use when making a body of work: instinct, curiosity, openness to the unknown, and an interest in the dynamic nature of the process. Like my photography, The Salon has been shaped and informed by literature and light — their capacity to cohere and manifest harmony, beauty, and emotional connection.
As when making photographs, I have intentionally fashioned The Salon into a space for artistic and personal growth, one that invites dialogue and feedback, with the express intent of investigating, challenging, and expanding our perceptions and choices. In making images, I rely on research to amplify my ideas and on writing to clarify my thoughts. I acknowledge the rules and limitations of the medium, but probe beyond them. Above all, I deeply respect my subjects — an eastern kingbird’s carcass; a blossoming sapling during blue hour; a friend standing in dune grasses lit with late afternoon light. I approach them with sensitivity, appreciation, and care. In time, images cohere to create meaning on their own and enter into dialogue when collected together.
The idea for The Salon came from two former students who wished to continue working together. Similar to the seminars I lead in formal learning environments, I structured our first meeting, which took place in July 2015 in my Long Island City studio, around understanding the visual language of photography, technique, cultivation of attention, history and theory, photographic literature and poetry, and personal growth. I engaged my mentees with presence and empathy — and a deep desire to support them as artists. My focus was sharp. I measured the light — their light — and shadows. And together we enjoyed a fertile exchange, first around the table about Charlotte Cotton’s The Photograph as Contemporary Art, and then in front of their images hanging on my studio walls. We convened weekly for years.
In 2021, following a hiatus, I relaunched The Salon virtually, welcoming new members who were dedicated to learning and evolving as thinkers and image makers, and who shared values of generosity, integrity, courage, and compassion. During the perilous pandemic times, we committed to meeting every week following the same established structure: brief greetings and sharing; discussion of selected readings; and reviews of their work. Once a month, we were joined by a guest artist who offered insights into their practices and expanded our sense of connectedness. Guests included Sharon Core, Linda Foard Roberts, and Michael Lundgren.
Though not actually present, other artists have deeply informed the pedagogical and aesthetic philosophy that guides my leadership of The Salon. For example, my own teachers — the photographer Stephen Shore and the painter Graham Nickson — instilled in me a commitment to formal, technical, and conceptual rigor and inspired my approach, which is grounded by and oriented toward seeing relationally with an empathetic gaze and an openness to discovery. I also learned from them an orientation toward the act of creation through an embodied, exploratory experience informed by diverse influences, rather than with the purpose of making art.
In addition to the artists with whom I have formally studied, the photographer Robert Adams’ work and ideas have influenced my teaching and creative practices. I share, in particular, his belief in the synergy of truth and beauty — that their interdependence demonstrates that out of connection, kinship, and care come coherence, grace, and clarity of vision; and a belief in light’s capacity to transmute dissonance into harmony, to enhance our emotional connection to the surrounding world, and to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
In September 2023, we celebrated The Salon members’ remarkable dedication and work, as well as the bond we created, with an exhibition in New York City and a book, Welcome to The Salon (Tonal Editions, 2023), featuring our images. It also includes an essay I wrote about the history of the salon, dating back to the Renaissance, and the genesis of my own:
[I] sketched a framework for The Salon centered around themes of growth, reflection, wonder, and discovery. I shared Marie Howe’s poem, “Singularity,” which considers the notions of home and belonging and, at the same time, encourages broadmindedness, imagination, and embrace of the unknown—critical elements of our creative practices. And lives. The last line of it reads,
“All everything home”
Other tenets of The Salon emerged as time passed and our kinship strengthened: a fundamental belief in unyielding support and encouragement; a veneration for personal vision guided by instinct; an unabashed reverence for beauty; an embrace of play as essential to the creative process; and a regard for sincerity and authenticity.
Now in its tenth year, The Salon and its members are thriving. Irina Chaiet, Anastasia Davis, and Chloe Jones have earned their MFAs. Lisa Barlow and Constance Jaeggi have published monographs. Jo Ann Chaus and José Antonio Rosas have books in progress. Others, including founding member Lori Perpeck and Kellyann Petry, actively exhibit and are building their careers, while others find sufficient reward in the process of making, learning, and sharing. All contribute generously to and benefit from being in community.
I, too, am rewarded. Although leading The Salon remains my priority, I am also nourished by it. I am inspired and challenged by the members, who enable me to learn and grow alongside them. Akin to making an image or creating a body of work, it is a relational experience, one guided by passion, careful seeing, and attention. I find deep gratification in witnessing and encouraging the creative exploration and growth of individuals as they discover themselves as artists and as makers of meaning. I also find deep gratification in returning what I have been given, in carrying forward the aesthetic and pedagogical knowledge and practices that have sustained me most as an artist. This notion of legacy is especially potent because Graham Nickson passed earlier this year. The Salon brings together unique image makers and connects them to others in ways that amplify everyone’s voices and ideas, and enhance everyone’s practice and development as people. Independent strength gained through interdependence.
Guest artists, curators, writers, poets, designers, and filmmakers have also made significant contributions to The Salon, kindly sharing their work with us, including:
Andy Adams, Mia Allen, Charity Baker, Brendan Bannon, Rebecca Bengal, Rachelle Bussières, Tim Carpenter, Montserrat Andrée Carty, Montana Currie, Martin Dull, Christine Elfman, Gerard Franciosa, Elisa Jensen, Melissa Joplin Higley, Chantal Lee and the New York Public Library Picture Collection, Jessina Leonard, Sofia Lesquerre, Amanda Marchand, Ross McDonnell, Kaitlin McDonough, Klea McKenna, Mark Milroy, Fran O’Neill, Victoria Samburnaris Emily Sheffer, Leah Sobsey, Cheryle St. Onge, Brad Temkin, Alexia Webster, and Alex Yudzon.
Foremost, it is The Salon members I applaud and celebrate with joy and pride:
Barbara Bacior, Alicia Bair, Lisa Barlow, Whitney Bell, Janice Benjamin, Terry Bleser, Montserrat Andrée Carty, Lisa Cassell-Arms, Jo Ann Chaus, Geoff Cohen, Diane Collins, Pamela Fox, Daniela Guerrero, Constance Jaeggi, Rebecca Johnson, Stephanie Kaufman, Tom Klem, Karen Kochonies, Anthoula Lelekidis, B. Jane Levine, Victoria Manzoli, Irene Marchetto, Amy Murphy, Lori Perbeck, Kellyann Petry, Andrew Rizzardi, José Antonio Rosas, Stevie Rosenfeld, Becca Screnock, Mara Tarnopol, Amanda Trainor, Roberta Trentin, and Elizabeth Yektai. Their work can be seen here.
About the author
Janelle Lynch is an artist and writer. Her photographs and cyanotypes have been exhibited worldwide and are in museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs by Radius Books: Los Jardines de México, Barcelona, and Another Way of Looking at Love.
Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Photograph Magazine, The Guardian, and NPR’s The Picture Show. In 2019, Lynch was shortlisted for The Prix Pictet, and in 2024, she was the subject of a documentary film, Janelle Lynch: Endless Forms Most Beautiful.
Her writing has appeared in monographs, exhibition catalogues, and LensCulture, among other publications. She is a faculty member at the International Center of Photography and hosts The Salon, a photography collective.
She is represented by Flowers Gallery and lives and works in New York City and Amagansett, New York.