Promise Land by Lydia Panas
“These are my feelings, learned within the home as well as public expectations.”
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LYDIA PANAS: This work is about the things we keep hidden that create imaginary guilt and shame and prevent us from being all we want to be. The images attempt to describe how we feel when love is being withheld. The models are stand-ins for my feelings as a young girl, of hidden thoughts, uncertainty, and shame, generated by the fear of rejection. This is my story. I am a white woman, of Greek ancestry, an immigrant who spent my earliest years crossing the Atlantic Ocean twice. Both instances landed me in a country without the language to communicate.
Promise Land portrays women and girls as stand-ins for me. These are my feelings, learned within the home as well as public expectations. The story is mine, but I believe it is felt by all. I photograph my personal landscape in rural Pennsylvania, which includes friends and others who are willing to model.
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Lydia Panas’s photographs have been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally. Her work has won many awards and featured extensively in periodicals such as the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Photo District News and Popular Photography and The Wall Street Journal Blog. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum; The Bronx Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Allentown Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; The Sheldon Museum, and Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai among others. She has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, and New York University/ International Center of Photography. Panas also received a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship and a CFEVA Fellowship. Her first monograph “The Mark of Abel” (Kehrer Verlag), was named a Photo District News Book, a Photo Eye Best Book as well as a best coffee table book by The Daily Beast. Her second book Falling From Grace was released in 2016. She lives and works in Pennsylvania and New York.