Lydia Panas

Turning to the Phoenix. Kutztown, PA in 2007

Lydia Panas (b. 1958, USA) has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, New York University and ICP. Her work has won numerous awards and has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, Photo District News, Popular Photography and is held in numerous public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego among others. She has received a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship. Her first monograph The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag), was named a best book of 2012 from PDN and the Daily Beast.

About the Photograph:

“I was working on a series of portraits about family relationships when I made this photograph. Vanessa is a gentle and quiet woman. She is fiercely political, but always soft and discreet. I admired how she spoke about her daughter. She and Abby’s father divorced early and Abby was raised between two homes. I remember thinking how difficult it would feel to share my daughter with another woman/mother but Vanessa was always generous about the time Abby spent with her father and stepmother. I would ask her, how do you feel having to share? Do you resent it? Do you feel pushed aside when she is with them? Vanessa, measured perhaps, but also thoughtful indicated that Abby had a second perspective and extra love in her life. I think it was somewhat painful, but she did not waiver, referencing Abby as most important in the equation.”